Of
Andreas Glas and Matthias Köpf, Munich
In the end it was a ruse, a classic deception. Markus Blume and Minister of Agriculture Michaela Kabiner marched side by side into the CSU parliamentary group meeting on Wednesday. The old general secretary and the new general? Many in the group had expected this scenario. But then everything turned out differently. It is not a woman who is moving into the Munich party headquarters, but a man again: Stephan Mayer, 48, CSU member of the Bundestag, who was Parliamentary State Secretary in Horst Seehofer’s Federal Ministry of the Interior until the fall. “A great choice,” says CSU party leader Markus Söder.