Chancellor candidate (Germany)

Election poster with Helmut Kohl, 1976.

The chancellor candidate (German: Kanzlerkandidat) is the name for the candidate, which in the Federal Republic of Germany traditionally run for the most promising parties in a federal election. The parties are indicating that their parliamentary group wants to elect this candidate as Federal Chancellor in the newly constituted German Bundestag. The rest of them generally refrain from naming a candidate for chancellor.

The chancellor is elected by the Bundestag and appointed by the president of Germany. This applies in particular to the beginning of a new parliamentary term, as the term of office of the previous chancellor ends at this point and a new chancellor has to be elected and a new federal government has to be formed. Since the majority in the Bundestag is also decisive for the election of the chancellor, the two major parties traditionally nominate a candidate before the Bundestag election in order to show the eligible population who they think should become Chancellor.

Before 2002, only one candidate from the sister parties CDU/CSU and one representative of the SPD competed against each other under this name. For the 2002 federal election, a candidate for Chancellor of the FDP ran for the first and so far only time. For the 2021 Bundestag election a candidate from The Greens ran for the first time.

Nomination

There is no regulated procedure for nominating a chancellor candidate. In political practice, the major parties nominate their candidate for chancellor in the run-up to the federal election (up to a year in advance), often by voting at a Party conference. The respective candidate for chancellor is the main figure of the party in the following election campaign, even if he cannot be directly elected by the electorate; instead, his prospect of the office of Federal Chancellor is strengthened by the vote of the elector, who elects the party of the chancellor candidate.

With the exception of Angela Merkel in 2021, the incumbent chancellor has run again each time in the next election in order to be able to continue in office with the support of the voters. Nevertheless, there may be a discussion in the chancellor's party about whether the incumbent should run again, as was the case in the run-up to the 1998 federal election, when members in the CDU called for a “generation change” from Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who has been in office since 1982.

Specifying a chancellor candidate - a position with great media effectiveness - can lead to strong disputes within the party, especially with the respective opposition party, for example in the run-up to the 2013 federal election when the party leader Sigmar Gabriel, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Peer Steinbrück were discussed in the SPD as potential candidates.

The sister parties CDU and CSU nominate a joint candidate; So far the election has been made twice, in 1980 and 2002, for a CSU candidate (namely the respective Franz Josef Strauss and Edmund Stoiber). In the run-up to the federal election in 2002, the term Chancellor question (Kanzlerfrage) was coined for the decision between the two possible Union Chancellor candidates - CDU chairmen Angela Merkel and Edmund Stoiber. Usually, a candidate for chancellor who challenges an incumbent chancellor is party or parliamentary group chairman or head of government of one of the 16 German states - exceptions were or are the candidates for chancellor for the SPD by Hans-Jochen Vogel in 1983, Frank-Walter Steinmeier in 2009, Peer Steinbrück in 2013 and Olaf Scholz in 2021.

In 1969, 2009 and 2021, Willy Brandt, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Olaf Scholz, who served as Vice Chancellors in a grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD, chancellor candidates for their parties.

Usually, the candidate for chancellor receives first place on the state list from his home state association.

Chancellor candidates

The following table lists all of the chancellor candidates who have run for the major parties CDU/CSU and SPD in Bundestag elections since 1949, in 2002 also for the FDP and in 2021 also for The Greens.

Guido Westerwelle was the FDP's first and so far only candidate for Chancellor. At the age of 39, he became in 2001 the youngest candidate to date. He is also the youngest former candidate to die.

	Chancellor candidate of Germany
Year	CDU/CSU	SPD	Greens	FDP
1949	Konrad Adenauer	Kurt Schumacher
1953	Konrad Adenauer	Erich Ollenhauer
1957	Konrad Adenauer	Erich Ollenhauer
1961	Konrad Adenauer	Willy Brandt
1965	Ludwig Erhard	Willy Brandt
1969	Kurt Georg Kiesinger	Willy Brandt
1972	Rainer Barzel	Willy Brandt
1976	Helmut Kohl	Helmut Schmidt
1980	Franz Josef Strauß	Helmut Schmidt
1983	Helmut Kohl	Hans-Jochen Vogel
1987	Helmut Kohl	Johannes Rau
1990	Helmut Kohl	Oskar Lafontaine
1994	Helmut Kohl	Rudolf Scharping
1998	Helmut Kohl	Gerhard Schröder
2002	Edmund Stoiber	Gerhard Schröder		Guido Westerwelle
2005	Angela Merkel	Gerhard Schröder
2009	Angela Merkel	Frank-Walter Steinmeier
2013	Angela Merkel	Peer Steinbrück
2017	Angela Merkel	Martin Schulz
2021	Armin Laschet	Olaf Scholz	Annalena Baerbock

References

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📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• List of chancellors of Germany by age
• Wolfcraft

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