ONLY a couple of weeks ago Angela Merkel looked to be treading a fraying tightrope. A mediocre “grand coalition” deal between her Christian Democrats (CDU), their Bavarian partners the Christian Social Union and the Social Democrats (SPD) had been sealed and the first cabinet appointments announced. Criticism from various wings of the CDU was mounting: the election result had been a disappointment, the coalition programme was inadequate, ceding the finance ministry to the SPD had been an error, the CDU’s proposed ministerial line-up did not bring forward younger figures who might lead the party after Mrs Merkel. The tightrope: to prepare her party’s future without writing off the remainder of her leadership in the process.

Today she stepped off the tightrope, following a series of clever tactical moves culminating in a successful party conference in Berlin. Nominating Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (pictured with Mrs Merkel above), the moderate minister-president of the Saarland, as the new general secretary of the CDU pleased centrists in the party. Lining up Jens Spahn, an outspoken critic of her refugee policies, as health minister persuaded conservatives that she would heed their concerns too. Addressing delegates in a trendy warehouse in Kreuzberg, Mrs Merkel acknowledged certain criticisms without giving substantial ground. She ascribed the CDU’s election losses to voters’ “Unbehagen” (malaise or discomfort) about three things: the state’s effectiveness in moments like the refugee crisis; technological change; an uncertain international climate. The speech won her a four-minute standing ovation. Over 97% of delegates backed a grand coalition and over 98% voted for Mrs Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is thought to be Mrs Merkel’s preferred successor. The chancellor concludes the day stabilised. She may be in the final chapters of her domination of German politics, but these are more likely denominated in years than in weeks or months.

That does not, however, mean business as usual. For one thing, the SPD’s membership is still voting on whether to join a grand coalition. If the result this Sunday is a “no”—still a real possibility—the negotiations and cabinet sketches of past weeks will have come to naught. That would be a fresh blow to Mrs Merkel and would produce either an unprecedented minority government or fresh elections, further prolonging Germany’s already five-month-old spell of post-election uncertainty. And even with a “yes” from the SPD, the tensions in the CDU are far from resolved. In fact, the debates have only just begun. In recent years Mrs Merkel’s electorally successful, highly tactical and ideologically indistinct brand of centrism has smothered the contrasts between its different ideological tendencies: liberal, christian-social and conservative. Now, however, a new period of cut-and-thrust in the party seems to be emerging.

Amid the North Korean-like results of the headline votes at today’s conference, for example, there was also a welcome cacophony of views on the CDU’s condition and course. Heads shook as Mrs Merkel defended the loss of the finance ministry. The president of the party’s business board complained that the coalition deal “concentrates primarily on redistribution and has no answer to the big questions in our country”. Paul Ziemiak, the leader of the party’s youth wing tipped as a rising star, said the CDU needed a clearer profile; a party comrade from its Baden-Württemberg branch went further, opining that it had all the sharpness of a “worn down tyre”; the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, on the other hand, argued firmly against a more conservative turn. Many vested their hopes in Mrs Kramp-Karrenbauer: “she’s someone with her own head, and doesn’t just say what the government says”, waxed the head of the CDU’s Mittelstand association. 

The incoming general secretary did not disappoint. Where Mrs Merkel’s speech seemed primarily oriented to the past—the loudest applause came when she thanked outgoing cabinet members like Wolfgang Schäuble—Mrs Kramp-Karrenbauer’s punchier address concentrated on the future. She said she would prioritise rewriting the CDU’s statement of principles by 2021 (when the next election is due) and make the CDU “the place where there’s a real contest”. Hints of that coming debate came from Mr Spahn, who refrained from criticising Mrs Merkel in his speech but branded the election result a “bitter” disappointment and claimed the CDU needs to close off the space to its political right, to make the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “superfluous”.

To many in the party a post-Merkel leadership contest might pit these two rising players against each other in a battle between two quite different futures for German christian democracy. Mrs Kramp Karrenbauer, known as “mini Merkel”, belongs to the CDU’s christian-social wing. Like the chancellor she is temperamentally cautious and unflashy, a socially conservative economic centrist seemingly more comfortable in coalition with the SPD than the free-market Free Democrats (FDP). Mr Spahn by contrast is a liberal who has cannily aligned himself with the CDU’s conservatives on refugees and integration and is a good friend of the FDP’s leader Christian Lindner. An admirer of swish young European leaders like Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Leo Varadkar of Ireland, he wants a more thrusting and crisply differentiated CDU. Watching how “AKK”, Mr Spahn and perhaps also Julia Klöckner, the incoming agriculture minister, set out their stalls in the coming months will be fascinating.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on this blog that “politics has broken out in Germany” after a relatively depoliticised period in the country’s post-war history: a more fragmented Bundestag should prove a more vibrant one; the grand coalition deal commits its signatories to more open disagreement and debate; a minority government would generate even more of that; Andrea Nahles, the SPD’s pugilistic incoming leader, stands a reasonable chance of putting the fight back into Germany’s struggling left. The last few days have produced two additional signposts in this direction. On Friday Cem Özdemir, the former Green party leader, gave a storming speech accusing the AfD of “despising everything modern Germany stands for”, electrifying the once-sleepy Bundestag. And today the CDU has launched what could turn out to be a period of critical reflection, personnel renewal and genuine ideological contest. Oxygen is flooding back into the bloodstream of German politics. And that’s a good thing.