Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting makes a rightward tilt

DUMPING ON VOTERS is rarely a winning strategy for politicians. But Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany’s largest party, says her compatriots are becoming “the most uptight people in the world”. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer had been criticised for a joke, made during west Germany’s riotous carnival season, about “third-gender bathrooms” for “men who can’t decide if they want to sit or stand when they pee”. But she was not in the mood to apologise. How absurd to police jokes at a carnival, she thundered last week, going on to defend the rights of carnivores, fireworks fans and children who like to dress up as cowboys and Indians.

The semiotics of carnival in Germany are difficult for outsiders to parse. But what initially seemed a silly-season story now looks like a tactical gambit. Last December Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer narrowly beat a conservative rival in an election to replace Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and her mentor, as CDU leader. That put her in the top position to take over as chancellor when Mrs Merkel steps down, as she has promised to do. Many on the party’s right who had grown tired of Mrs Merkel’s big-tent centrism feared they were in line for years more of the same. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer wants to change their minds.

She has started by sharpening the CDU’s...