NEXT MERKEL? Right-winger bids for top job with attack on leader - 'she's LOST CONTROL!'

GERMANY'S young health minister has launched his campaign to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel with a withering attack on her liberal immigration policy, which saw more than one million refugees enter Europe’s most powerful economy.

Jens Spahn

Jens Spahn, 38, is a rising star in Mrs Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and has often been tipped as a successor to the veteran politician who has led Germany since 2005.

But writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper yesterday the health minister said Mrs Merkel, 64, had “lost control” of immigration after opening the door to 1.1 million migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa in 2015.

He wrote: “The ‘white elephant in the room’ is the question of migration. It is an issue that in the eyes of many voters has not been ended or solved.”

Mr Spahn added that the large-scale immigration from three years ago had given the public “the impression that the state and politics had lost control [and] will not simply disappear from people’s minds”.

Many critics say mass immigration has sparked the recent political success of far-right parties in Germany.

Mr Spahn’s comment come after Mrs Merkel said last week she would step down as chancellor in 2021, and would relinquish her post as leader of the CDU next month, which she has held since 2000.

The Chancellor’s move comes after a series of political setbacks, with her coalition partner, the Social Democrats, culminating in poor electoral results in the German state of Hesse earlier this month.

The youthful Spahn is on the right of the CDU, and has perviously called for a ban on the burka. He has been quick to portray himself as a law-and-order candidate, writing that “the rule of law and security are the preconditions for our liberal, European society”.

However, the health minister has been a long-time critic on his party’s conservative attitude to gay rights. He married his partner, David Funke, last December.

Reichstag and flag

Spahn’s comments on immigration comes as Germany’s integration czar, Annette Widmann-Mauz, this week called for sexual equality courses for asylum seekers in the wake of a recent high-profile gang-rape case in Freiburg on a 18-year-old woman committed by seven Syrian refugees and a German.

The health minister faces a fight for the CDU’s top job. He is up against the party’s general secretary Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, 56, regarded as Merkel’s favoured successor, and Friedrich Merz, 62, who was edged out in a power struggle with the Chancellor several years ago.