Armin Laschet (; born 18 February 1961) is a German politician who served as Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2017 to 2021 and as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 2021 to 2022. He was a candidate for Chancellor of Germany in 2021.
Laschet earned a law degree and worked as a journalist before and during his early political career. In 1994 he was elected to the Bundestag and in 1999 he became a Member of the European Parliament. In 2005 he entered state politics in North Rhine-Westphalia as a member of the state government. In 2012 he became leader of the state party, and he was elected Prime Minister of the state in 2017. His Cabinet consisted of members of his own CDU and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
In January 2021, Laschet was elected leader of the CDU, winning 52.8% of delegates votes against Friedrich Merz in the second round of the contest. The result of the election was certified by postal vote of the party conference's delegates with the final result announced on 22 January. It was confirmed on 20 April 2021 that he would be the CDU/CSU candidate for Chancellor of Germany at the 2021 German federal election, after rival Markus Söder conceded.
He was born to an observant Roman Catholic family of German-speaking Walloon origin; his father's parents were both of Belgian origin. He is married to Susanne Malangré, whom he met in a Catholic children's choir when they were children and who is a member of a prominent Aachen political family of French-speaking Walloon origin.
On 9 February 2024, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from TED University.
Laschet is a lecturer for political science at LMU Munich.
Early life and education Laschet was born in Burtscheid, a suburb of Aachen, about three kilometres from the Belgian and Dutch borders, to parents Heinrich Laschet and Marcella née Frings; he was raised in an observant Roman Catholic family. His father was a mining engineer at a black coal mine and later became an elementary school teacher and headmaster. The Laschet family is originally from Liège Province in Wallonia in modern Belgium where the family's ancestor Jacques (or Jacob) Laschet lived in Hergenrath in the Duchy of Limburg in the 18th century; his paternal grandfather Hubert Laschet (1899–1984) moved from Hergenrath to Aachen in the 1920s; his paternal grandmother Hubertina Wetzels (1900–1979) had been born in Aachen to parents who had just moved there from Welkenraedt in Belgium.Bernhard Willems, "Die früheren Grundherren des Bereiches von Eupen", Ostbelgische Chronik, Vol. 2, 1949 Like many others in the tri-border area the Laschets had relatives across the national boundaries, who lived in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Neutral Moresnet. Laschet maintains close personal ties to Belgium where members of the Laschet family still live.
He attended the Pius-Gymnasium in Aachen and studied law at the University of Bonn and LMU Munich, passing the first state examination in law in 1987. He studied journalism from 1986 to 1988. In Munich, he became a member of K.D.St.V. Aenania München, a Catholic student fraternity that is member of the Cartellverband.
Laschet speaks fluent French.
Laschet worked as a journalist and in the publishing industry from 1986 until 1991, among other things as Bonn correspondent for Bayerischer Rundfunk. He later served as editor-in-chief of the Catholic newspaper KirchenZeitung Aachen from 1991 until 1994. From 1995 to 1999, while also serving as a member of parliament, he was CEO of the Catholic publishing company Einhard-Verlag, which had previously been led by his father-in-law Heinrich Malangré.
Political career Member of the German Bundestag, (1994–1998) After serving as staffer to the President of the Bundestag, Laschet became a member of the German Bundestag in the 1994 election. He was elected in the single-member constituency of Aachen I, after the incumbent Hans Stercken retired. He was on the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development and on the Committee for European Union Affairs. In addition, he was part of the so-called "Pizza-Connection" (a reference to an American drug ring). A number of informal meeting of a group of young Bundestag Members from both the CDU and the Greens. This was later seen as controversial, because it solidified an image of him as a liberal/centrist member of the CDU. He lost re-election in the 1998 SPD landslide to future Health Minister Ulla Schmidt.
Member of the European Parliament, (1999–2005) As Member of the European Parliament, Laschet served on the Committee on Budgets between 1999 and 2001 and on the Committee on Foreign Affairs between 2002 and 2005. In the latter capacity, he served as the Parliament's rapporteur on relations between the EU and the United Nations.
Role in state politics
Under Minister President Jürgen Rüttgers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet served as State Minister for Generations, Family, Women and Integration from 2005 until 2010, and as State Minister for Federal Affairs, Europe and Media from 2010. In 2010, he unsuccessfully ran against Norbert Röttgen for the post of CDU chairman in the state. When Röttgen resigned from that office in 2012, Laschet was elected as his successor. On 4 December 2012, he was elected as one of five deputy chairpersons of the national CDU party, serving alongside Volker Bouffier, Julia Klöckner, Thomas Strobl and Ursula von der Leyen.
Laschet currently serves as state MP in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia and also chairs the CDU's state chapter (Landesverband). From 2014 until 2016, he was a member of the North Rhine-Westphalia Commission for Constitutional Reform, led by Rainer Bovermann.Drucksache 16/12400: Abschlussbericht der Kommission zur Reform der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Verfassung (Verfassungskommission), 27 June 2016 Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the negotiations to form a Grand Coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU together with the Bavarian CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) following the 2013 federal elections, Laschet was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on energy policy, led by Peter Altmaier and Hannelore Kraft.
In November 2015, Laschet visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.Helmut Rehmsen (30 November 2015), Gespräch mit Armin Laschet über Flüchtlinge in Jordanien: "Die Grenzen sind hier immer schon offen" WDR 2. Between March 2015 and January 2016, he chaired the Robert Bosch Expert Commission to Consider a Realignment of Refugee Policy, an expert group convened by the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
In November 2016, Laschet was elected leading candidate for the North Rhine-Westphalia state elections in May 2017 which he won in what was widely considered an upset victory. He was a CDU delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2017.Wahl der Mitglieder für die 16. Bundesversammlung Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, decision of 14 December 2016.
In December 2016, Laschet presided over the CDU's national convention in Essen.Protokoll: 29. Parteitag der CDU Deutschlands, 6. – 7. Dezember 2016, Essen Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, (2017–2021) Laschet served as the 11th Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2017 to 2021. Laschet's government was a coalition between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). As one of his state's representatives at the Bundesrat, he serves as a member of the Federal Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Defence Committee.
Leader of the CDU, (2021–2022) Following Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer's announcement on 10 February 2020 that she would step down as CDU party leader before the end of 2020 and would not stand as a candidate for chancellor in the 2021 federal elections, Laschet announced at a national press conference on 25 February 2020 that he would run for the party presidency, and thus also for the chancellorship. He named Jens Spahn as his vice-presidential candidate, with Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen as his challengers.
Polls subsequently showed that voters rated Laschet's management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany's most populous state poorly.
The election of the new CDU party president, after several postponements due to the coronavirus epidemic, took place only at the two-day party congress in mid-January 2021, which was the first fully digital congress in the party's history. On the second day of the congress, 16 January 2021, Laschet won 38.42% of the votes in the first round and 52.79% in the second round. He thus became the new president of the CDU.
After his defeat at the head of his party in the federal elections, he resigned from the party leadership on 7 October. His place was taken by Merz, who finally succeeded in his third attempt, in the election of the party president on 17 December 2021.
CDU/CSU joint candidate for Chancellor However, the strong intra-party divisions that were also evident in the vote could have led to a joint CDU/CSU chancellorship candidacy for Markus Söder, the president of the smaller Bavarian sister party, the CSU. Polls conducted immediately before the party congress showed that 55 percent of voters considered Söder a good candidate for chancellor, while 80 percent of CDU/CSU supporters thought he was a good candidate, compared to only 27 percent and 32 percent respectively for Laschet.
Söder opted for a wait-and-see strategy, finally announcing at a press conference in Munich on 19 April 2021 that he would not delay the nomination of his candidate for chancellor as the federal elections approached, and that he and his party, the CSU, would therefore accept the decision of the CDU's "big sister" executive board meeting, which began that day, as binding on both him and his party, the CSU. Subsequently, following a late-night meeting of the CDU leadership in Berlin, it was announced that in a secret ballot, 77.5 percent of those present at the meeting had finally backed Laschet, compared to just 22.5 percent for Söder. Thus, it was a foregone conclusion that Armin Laschet would be in the running to become chancellor of the CDU/CSU coalition in September 2021. Asked why he did not step aside from his own candidacy for chancellor, as polls had shown that he had significantly worse chances than the CSU president, Laschet said he remembered it well, that during the campaign for the 2017 North Rhine-Westphalian state parliamentary elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, when he was given similarly low odds by pollsters against the then incumbent SPD state premier Hannelore Kraft, he still won the election.
Campaign to win the Chancellorship Subsequently, Laschet tried to "channel" the far greater popularity of his biggest rival within the CDU by recruiting Merz to his campaign team, saying that he "belonged in the team" and that his economic and financial expertise would be crucial in helping them to overcome the huge challenge of the pandemic in a sustainable way.
Already at the party congress in Rhineland-Palatinate in May 2021, Laschet called for the Greens to be the main political opponent in the upcoming election campaign. He set the goal of preventing the formation of a Red–Red–Green (SPD–Left–Greens) coalition.
As his party's candidate to succeed Merkel in the national elections, Laschet was initially seen as having made an uncertain start to his campaign and faced calls to chart a more right-wing course to win back voters disenchanted by the incumbent coalition government. However, the party's win in the Saxony-Anhalt elections was later interpreted as a boost to Laschet.