By January 2000, daily newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" claimed that Kohl, angered by party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble's efforts to distance himself from the scandal surrounding secret payments to the party, was encouraging Rüttgers to make a bid for the leadership at the CDU's annual conference; instead, Angela Merkel was elected as Schäuble's successor and Rüttgers became one of her four deputies, alongside Volker Rühe, Annette Schavan and Christian Wulff. In his role as chairman of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rüttgers later publicly endorsed Merkel as the party's candidate to challenge incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the 2002 federal elections; instead, Edmund Stoiber ended up being the joint candidate of CDU and CSU. In the state parliament ("Landtag") election 2005, Rüttgers was the opposition Christian Democratic Union's front-runner for the second time. After CDU and FDP won a majority of seats in the election on 22 May 2005, they formed a coalition to take over government from the former SPD and Green party coalition led by Peer Steinbrück. Rüttgers was elected Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia on 22 June. In his cabinet, he notably included representatives of the Christian Democrats’ more liberal wing, such as Armin Laschet (as State Minister for Generations, Family, Women and Integration) and Karl-Josef Laumann (as State Minister of Labor, Health and Social Affairs). On the national level, Rüttgers was part of the CDU/CSU team in the negotiations with the SPD on a coalition agreement following the 2005 federal elections, which paved the way to the formation of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first government. Under the leadership of Merkel as party chairwoman, he was re-elected vice-chairman of the CDU in November 2006, this time alongside Roland Koch, Annette Schavan and Christian Wulff. During his time in office, Rüttgers came under severe criticism for failing to mend the state's public finances. One of the reasons was the crisis at the state-owned lender WestLB, which led his government to set aside 1.5 billion in 2008. Rüttgers long wanted the bank to stay independent and categorically ruled out a merger with LBBW. However, by 2007, he and Roland Koch, his counterpart from the state of Hesse, agreed on approving a merger of their respective state-owned banks, WestLB and Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen (Helaba).