CDU politician sees alienation
Laumann: Too many lawyers in politics
7/22/2023 1:31 p.m
More and more people are sitting in the Bundestag who have had completely different paths in life than the cross-section of society. This is a big problem for CDU social politician Laumann. For him, that explains at least in part the success of the AfD.
The chairman of the CDU social wing, Karl-Josef Laumann, sees voters becoming increasingly alienated from the political parties. “Of course, we no longer reflect the sociological strata of our population in the political representation of MPs, of leaders in the population,” he said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk. That is a big problem. “And that has long-term consequences for the acceptance of the entire political system, including parliamentary representative democracy.”
Politics must pay more attention to the fact that the political team is made up of the entire population. “I grew up in a local union where great care was taken to ensure that we ran with workers, farmers and the self-employed in local elections,” said Laumann. That was a great recipe for success back then. “If almost a quarter of MPs are lawyers today, then that has nothing to do with the composition of the population,” he criticized.
Bring other people forward
The fact that the Union does not benefit from the dissatisfaction with the traffic light, but above all the AfD, also has to do with the biographies of the management staff. “We also have to have people up front who have a different biography than the current ones,” said Laumann, who comes from a farm and is a trained machinist. Laumann is health minister in North Rhine-Westphalia and federal head of the Christian Democratic Workers’ Union (CDA).
CDA Vice-Chairman Christian Bäumler had called for more influence for the social wing in the CDU party leadership after CDU leader Friedrich Merz had made Carsten Linnemann, an economic liberal, the designated Secretary General. Linnemann is so far one of five deputies to the party leader and will give up the post.
Bäumler had demanded that Laumann should then become party deputy. Laumann said: “We have the party conference where that will be decided in May next year. And I’ve been in politics for so long that I already know when you have to register for candidacy if you really want it – but not nine months before.”