Merkel's Succession Plan Falls Apart As Her Protegee Bows Out

[hedda_foil]

1. Makes me nervous AF too. Worse than bowing out is her reason: party members allying with far right.

She doesn't think she can hold the CDU together.

"AKK," as she is often known, has since had trouble uniting its many disparate factions. Those tensions came to a head last week.

"Last week, in the German state of Thuringia, a local faction of her party joined the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party — known as the AfD — to elect the state's first minister, breaking with the party's aversion to working with the AfD, a party many in Germany label fascist," NPR's Rob Schmitz reported from Berlin.

The breakaway went against Kramp-Karrenbauer's explicit wishes as well as a post-WWII norm that major parties avoid cooperating with the far-right.

"The AfD stands against everything we as the CDU represent," Kramp-Karrenbauer said Monday, according to The Associated Press. "Any convergence with AfD weakens the CDU."