The CDU politician Jens Spahn was re-elected on Tuesday afternoon as the head of the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag. He received 86.5 percent of the votes and will therefore remain in office until the end of the current legislative term.
The result was somewhat below his first election result in 2025, when he was chosen with 91.3 percent (TheColu.mn reported). He had made history then by becoming the first openly gay member elected as the Union parliamentary group leader.
The weaker result is still viewed as a clear endorsement. Before the vote, his surroundings had said that anything above 80 percent would be fine. Some had even expected him to surpass 90 percent again. After all, a decisive reform phase lies ahead, and you don’t want to send the leader into the ring against the SPD when he isn’t at full strength.
The result reflected the faction’s split, said one member after the vote. There is, on the one hand, strong discontent; on the other, they don’t want to “blow up” the operation. The election within the Union takes place a year after taking office and applies to the remainder of the term.
Before the caucus meeting, Spahn urged unity for the Union and the SPD. He warned that in recent months the party had become entangled in “spirals of self-confirmation and justification.” “We have to and want to get out of that, back to working together in this coalition,” he said. “We are obliged to solve the problems in the political center, within this coalition.”
Spahn named Germany’s least popular politician in INSA poll
However, Spahn may have concerns about his public image: according to a survey by the polling institute INSA, he is the least-liked among 20 top politicians — displacing Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU), who rose to 19th place (paywalled article). At the outset of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, Spahn, then federal health minister, was Germany’s most popular politician.
The most popular politicians in the poll are Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD), followed by the designated Baden-Württemberg minister-president Cem Özdemir (Greens) and North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister-president Hendrik Wüst (CDU).
