MUNICH, Germany, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- After almost 14 years leading Bavaria and his party, a top German politician resigned after an aide had snooped into a rival's private life.
Edmund Stoiber, 65, who has been the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, or CSU, for almost 14 years, said he would step down as state premier of Bavaria and party chairman in September.
The CSU is the sister party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, but it only operates in Bavaria where it has been the dominant force in politics for the past decades. Stoiber in 2002 only narrowly lost the chancellor's office to Gerhard Schroeder in the country's national elections.
Stoiber has in the past rowed and sided with Merkel. The opposition nevertheless said the German grand coalition government in Berlin was destabilized by the scandal.
"The CSU is a government party that obviously can't cope with its own problems," Dirk Niebel, secretary-general of the opposition Free Democrats, Monday told German news channel n-tv. "That leads to a power vacuum in the federal government."
In December, the white-haired Stoiber slid into a scandal when reports surfaced that his top aide had tried to gather compromising details of the private life of his inner-party critic Gabriele Pauli.
While Stoiber fired his aide, he has now succumbed to the calls for his resignation, which became increasingly loud and plentiful in recent days.
A successor has not yet been found, and some say Stoiber might quit even before September.
