Annagret Kramp-Karrenbauer, head of the German Christian Democrats, attends an election campaign rally on April 27, 2019 in Munster, Germany | Alexander Koerner/Getty Images German CDU chief under fire for comments about campaigning on YouTube Kramp-Karrenbauer says she wants to debate rules for how ‘opinion is manufactured’ online after German vloggers ask viewers to boycott her party.

BERLIN — The head of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) — and Angela Merkel’s favored successor as German chancellor — is under fire for suggesting a debate about rules for how “opinion is manufactured” online.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, or AKK as she's known in her home country, made the comments in response to a video released ahead of last weekend's European Parliament election, in which over 70 YouTube celebrities asked viewers to boycott Germany’s governing parties, including the CDU, because of their climate policy.

"AKK's statement ... is an unprecedented attack on freedom of speech,” the chief whip of the far-left Die Linke party in the Bundestag, Niema Movassat, wrote on Twitter.

“You can only hope that this is rooted in helplessness and not in political conviction,” Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth of the Green Party said, speaking to DPA news agency.

The Germany director of NGO Human Rights Watch described AKK's pitch as a "demand for online censorship [that] is devious and reminiscent of autocrats like [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”

Facing a mounting backlash, Kramp-Karrenbauer shot back at critics Monday evening, tweeting that it is “absurd to accuse me of wanting to regulate the expression of opinion,” while defending her comments as a necessary call to debate political campaigning in the age of the Internet.

“Freedom of speech is a precious commodity in democracy,” she wrote. “But what we need to discuss are rules for campaigning.”

But even officials from her own party have begun to distance themselves from the remarks.

"Freedom of opinion cannot be regulated," Mike Mohring, the CDU's regional party leader in the state of Thuringia, said Monday evening on public broadcaster ARD.

'Asymmetrical campaigning'

Kramp-Karrenbauer's CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, received about 29 percent of the German vote during Sunday's election — more than 7 percentage points less than their 2014 result.

What's more, they performed particularly poorly among young voters, with just 13 percent of Germans under 30 voting for the conservative bloc.

Ahead of the vote, a YouTube video — in which vlogger Rezo accused Merkel’s governing coalition of destroying the planet for future generations — had ignited a fiery debate.

In the 55-minute video published eight days before the vote, Rezo accused Merkel's and AKK's conservatives of failing to tackle issues such as climate change and economic inequality, and he called on viewers to boycott the ruling parties in the election.

After his video garnered millions of views, Rezo was joined two days ahead of the vote by an alliance of more than 70 other German YouTube vloggers.

In a three-minute followup video, they asked voters not to back Merkel's bloc or the Social Democrats, their coalition partner, because of their climate policies.

"What would actually happen in this country if, say, 70 newspapers decided just two days before the election to make the joint appeal: 'Please don't vote for the CDU and SPD'?" Kramp-Karrenbauer asked Monday during a press conference, following a meeting with other party leaders, before making her pitch to start a debate about rules over online campaigning.

"This does raise the question — looking at the way opinion is manufactured — what rules already exist in the analog world and which rules are also valid for the digital sphere," she said.

Despite the backlash, the 56-year-old seems determined to walk the walk: For a meeting of her party leadership on Sunday, AKK is said to have put the item “asymmetrical campaigning” on the agenda.