🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[Vosem]

Is Merz considered to be favored? Virtually all the discourse that I've seen just assumes that Merz would be the next leader, even though it seems to me like an internal election in a deeply establishmentarian party like the CDU (as opposed to an Anglophone type of primary) should give a victory to the establishment candidate, who would be AKK.

[Vosem]

I wonder if part of the story of the surge for far-right options isn't the recent success of far-right parties in other parts of the continent? The Sweden Democrats were if anything more ostracized than the AfD until 2022, but now they've entered a government and have had real influence on Kristersson's policies (or at least his rhetoric); Giorgia Meloni's party was never really ostracized in the same way, but her leading a government as Prime Minister is also sort of unprecedented. (The RN in France have not yet entered government, but in 2022 the 'republican front' clearly broke down at the voter level, with not just center-right but many centrist voters preferring the RN to left-wing candidates, which would've been unthinkable in, like, 2017.) The western European far-right had a very successful year in 2022, and so voting for an organization like the AfD must feel less unrealistic now.

[Vosem]

Two questions about the new parties:

1) BSW seems like a very serious effort, and one which is hitting double-digits in some polls. Is it likely to just replace Linke overall, at least on the federal level where Linke has struggled to hit the threshold overall? Also, since it is not a direct successor to the SED/PDS, is it likely to have an easier time forming coalitions with the other left-wing parties than Linke itself did, or do the personalities running it mean that's not actually a guarantee at all?

2) WU doesn't seem like a very serious effort, given that parties in the space between CDU and AfD have consistently failed to take off, but in the past all such parties have been founded by AfD dissidents, and so have not had much appeal to CDU voters who might be leery of the AfD's associations. Does a former Verfassungsschutz director get around that problem, or is he not actually well-known enough to do so? Also, if there's lots of demand for a further-but-not-that-far right party, why has FW only taken off in certain Landtage and not federally? Why wouldn't Maaßen join FW, or form some sort of tacit alliance with them? This feels like it's purpose is just to divide the right-wing vote (...which may indeed be its purpose, I guess).