Germany’s next chancellor is likely to come from North Rhine-Westphalia

ON JANUARY 16TH 1,001 parliamentarians, party functionaries and small-town mayors will open their laptops, log into a virtual congress of Germany’s ruling centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and elect their party’s new leader. The winner will instantly become the favourite to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor once she steps down after an election in September. Yet on the face of it the delegates do not have much of a choice. The three candidates—Armin Laschet, Norbert Röttgen and Friedrich Merz—are all Catholic trained lawyers aged between 55 and 65. Each has struggled to find a distinct message during an interminable campaign drawn out over almost a year by the pandemic. And all three come from the same state: North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the most populous of Germany’s 16 Länder.

NRW’s 18m inhabitants—over one-fifth of Germany’s total—would make it the seventh-largest country in the European Union. Its 34,000 square km (13,000 square miles) span the urbanised Rhine-Ruhr region, rural Münsterland, the mountainous Eifel and much more. Walloped by deindustrialisation, its rustbelt cities have reinvented themselves as hubs for retail, logistics and other services. Farther east, the small and medium-sized firms of the Mittelstand in Westphalia rival anything in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg for technical specialisation and export prowess. The traditional gulf between carnivalesque Rhinelanders and dour Westphalians has been complicated by high immigration that has turned NRW into one of Germany’s most cosmopolitan states. “NRW is a miniature Germany,” says Dennis Radtke, a CDU member of the European Parliament from the Ruhr. “If you can run the state, you can run the country.”