“1149 GMT — GERMANY — Survey results released Sept. 23 in Germany show that 47 percent of those polled want Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Angela Merkel to be the country’s next chancellor, and 44 percent favor incumbent Gerhard Schroeder of the Social Democrats. The Emnid polling institute survey also shows that 73 percent oppose new elections to resolve the standoff. One in four Germans backs a coalition government between Merkel and Schroeder’s parties, and one in three prefers a coalition of the CDU, sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), the liberal Free Democrats and the environmentalist Greens.”

No, there is no such understanding.
And the fact that there are actually 2 parties who have to agree on 1 candidate makes the selection process somewhat troublesome.
The process is very informal and the matter is generally settled by arrangement between the two party leaders (in 2002 for instance, the decisive meeting was at breakfast in Mr Stoiber’s house).
Of course, if none of them is willing to back down, things can get messy.

The fact that there are two parties involved, makes it impossible to chose a candidate by mor conventional methods such as a vote of the party members or by a party assembly.

Müntefering isn’t wrong to state that CDU and CSU are separate parties. But that fact is irrelevant to his argument that SPD has first dibs at naming a chancellor, because what matters in the Bundestag is not party but ‘caucus’ (Fraktion). And CDU/CSU do form a unified Fraktion. They do not compete anywhere in Germany. (You might recall that, shortly after unification, the CSU sponsored an eastern puppet — the DSU — that might have been a trial balloon for dissolving the Fraktion. Whether it was or not, in the event the DSU didn’t come to anything and has long since disappeared.)

Mind you, just because Müntefering is playing cute doesn’t mean that the Union naming the chancellor in a grand coalition is a constitutional imperative. And it’s true that the Union, with this formally correct but itself rather cute ‘two parties, one Fraktion’ distinction, is on a number of fronts able to have its cake and eat it too.

They have different positions; they have different leaders; they have different names; they have different levels of support. Are they not separate parties? If not, then of what, precisely, is Hr Dr Edmund Stoiber chairman?

Of course it’s a cheeky move by Münterfering to point this out. Doesn’t make him wrong.

Err… Huh… ?