Let's start with this.

German cabinet proposes 24 September election date

After a cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning in Berlin, the German government settled on the last Sunday in September as a suggestion for the general election. German President Joachim Gauck must now officially accept the proposed date.

The election will be for the 19th session of the Bundestag, Germany's national parliament. All the current 630 representatives will be up for election, though the exact size of the future chamber depends on Germany's complex proportional representation system.

The elections will be watched worldwide to see whether Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will continue to hold the largest number of seats in the parliament, and therefore be in the strongest position to form a government. Also awaited is whether the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will pass the five percent hurdle and enter the legislative assembly for the first time.

The Greens look to be aiming for a coalition with the CDU, if this article is to be trusted.

German Greens pick Göring-Eckardt and Özdemir to lead party in election

Germany's Green Party announced Tuesday morning that Cem Özdemir and chairwoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt will lead the party into September's parliamentary elections.

Though she already had the position sealed because of the Green party's one-man-one-woman rule in its leadership positions, Göring Eckardt confirmed her place with 70.63 percent of the membership vote.

But the battle among the men for the other role was much tighter. Co-chair Cem Özdemir fought off parliamentary leader Anton Hofreiter and Robert Habeck, environment minister and deputy state premier of Schleswig-Holstein, by an extremely slim margin: Özdemir took 35.96 percent of the vote, to Habeck's 35.74 percent - a gap of only 75 votes. Hofreiter came third with 26.19 percent.

The interesting bit comes a bit later in the article.

This time, the party has chosen two from the so-called realist wing, and Hofreiter's third place was read by political pundits as a defeat for the party's leftist wing. But Göring-Eckardt dismissed the labels. "Our members showed that they don't think in wings," she said at the press conference, "and that's good." Predictably, she and Özdemir batted away any questions speculating about potential coalition preferences. "That can't be done in these times," she said.

Here is an older article on dissent within the CDU, portrayed by Speigel as an attack on Merkel by younger and more conservative politicans. This is a long and in-depth article with a lot of context on the CDU, and was thus quite informative for me.

Merkel Critics Deal a Blow to Chancellor

Now, at the CDU convention earlier this week, there was a movement afoot to do away with dual citizenship once again. And Merkel didn't stand a chance.

"Of course you have to make compromises in a governing coalition," said Spahn. "But we're at a party convention." The applause was so loud that it was immediately clear that he would emerge victorious and, ultimately, a majority of the delegates present voted to throw out the deal with SPD. Spahn, who is just 36 years old, showed Merkel, who has led the CDU for 16 years, where the limits of her power were.

The vote over dual citizenship was just the latest in a series of defeats recently handed to Merkel by her own party. Even before the convention, Spahn and other members of the party's conservative wing had pushed through important changes to those parts of the convention resolution pertaining to refugees. In addition, Thomas Strobl, one of five CDU deputy heads, unexpectedly introduced a paper calling for a stricter deportation policy. Parts of it were included word-for-word in in the resolution.

As for the SPD, they seem mostly ready to go forward agaisnt Merkel under current SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel.

SPD leader Gabriel expected to challenge Merkel in Germany

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Social Democrats (SPD) are expected to choose their long-standing chairman Sigmar Gabriel to run against conservative Angela Merkel for chancellor in September's federal election, senior party sources said on Thursday.

Gabriel, vice chancellor and economy minister in Merkel's right-left coalition for the last four years, is more popular with the SPD rank and file than his recent predecessors but also has a reputation for being impetuous and unpredictable.

"There's no way around Sigmar Gabriel as candidate for chancellor at this point," one senior party source told Reuters.

"The likelihood is very, very, very high that Gabriel will be the candidate for chancellor," a second source and member of the party's executive committee added.

Party officials stressed, however, that no final decision was expected until the end of January.

Some party members had hoped that Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament, would be named as the SPD's top candidate in the election, with polls showing he would get more votes than Gabriel in a matchup with Merkel.

That looks unlikely, especially now that the party is expected to name Schulz as foreign minister to replace Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whom the coalition parties agreed to elect as German president on Feb. 12.