CDU leader Merz strings one communication misstep after the next. It seems as if he wants to push the CDU to the right. Even the Union faction seems embarrassed by his latest blunder. He’s not even successful with it.
The best comment comes from Carlo Masala, security expert and political scientist at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. “Oof.” One could hardly react more accurately to the CDU chairman’s latest misstep.
In a panel discussion on the “Welt” channel, Merz said about rejected asylum seekers: “They sit at the doctor and have their teeth changed, and the German citizens next door don’t get any appointments.” His own group seems to be embarrassed by this statement: the sentence was used in a video that they distributed cut out.
Firstly, the statement is not true: Asylum seekers do not get to doctor’s appointments any quicker than Germans, and they only receive a “health card” after 18 months, which gives them access to medical care that goes beyond basic services that cannot be postponed. Secondly, it once again seems as if Merz wants to move the CDU significantly to the right.
It’s not the first time that Merz has gone far wrong in terms of communication – keyword firewall, keyword main opponent, keyword social tourists. If something like this happens once or twice, you can plead that you were misunderstood. But so often? And above all: With so little success? It is not the Union that benefits from the traffic light dispute, but the AfD. Merz’s personal poll numbers are also poor; only one in five Germans would vote for him as chancellor.
“Friedrich Merz speaks to what people are saying on the street,” says CSU politician Manfred Weber. This may be. But there is also this sentence from Franz Josef Strauss, which CSU leader Markus Söder often quotes: You should watch the people’s mouths, but not talk according to their mouths.
Carlo Masala came later expressed a little more detail about Merz, and he’s right about that too: Merz has shifted the discussion – away from criticism of a system that he apparently sees as flawed, and towards people. That means: He makes the refugees guilty. This is the opposite of solution-oriented politics, it is inciting the angry. When will the CDU realize that this path will not lead to success?