The CDU leadership wants to adopt a new basic program, but the party needs to speak. More than 2,000 amendments are tabled. Many of them are about small things, but three topics cause emotional debates until the afternoon.
Who says the CDU is a party that doesn’t like to discuss? This Tuesday, the 1,001 delegates at the party conference in Berlin had surprisingly engaged debates. You could almost have thought you had ended up with the Greens. But only until you listened more closely to issues such as asylum, equality and conscription, which caused the greatest excitement until the afternoon.
It was about the big picture, namely the new basic program that is to be adopted at the party conference. The party had been working on this for two years under the leadership of General Secretary Carsten Linnemann. The draft is 74 pages long and predominantly breathes the spirit of the political center. More than 2,000 amendments were submitted before the party conference and were pushed through in plenary session. A number of these involved minimal changes to the wording in the draft program. But a few topics caused controversy.
For example, asylum policy, in which the CDU wants to usher in a paradigm shift: away from individual asylum rights and towards a quota solution. For some delegates this still didn’t go far enough. They tried to further tighten these regulations through applications. Anyone who arrives at the EU’s external border from a safe third country and wants asylum should be turned away, demanded one applicant. Another wanted to get the word “deportations” written into the basic program – it is actually missing. However, the term is described with “repatriations” and other formulations. Both applications failed.
Asylum and conscription cause debates
Former Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen also failed with an application that was intended to strengthen individual asylum rights again. Thorsten Frei, the first parliamentary managing director in the Bundestag, rejected this on behalf of the application committee. He promised that the EU could accept 300,000 to 500,000 people per year. But these should be people “who really needed protection.” The EU should decide who is accepted and not the smuggler gangs.
In addition to the asylum issue, the return to compulsory military service also sparked a discussion. This was actually not planned by the party conference management. The draft program only requires a general duty of service. The application committee said that this could then also be served in the Bundeswehr. But that wasn’t enough for some applicants. They finally managed to include the reintroduction of compulsory military service in the program.
The chairman of the Junge Union, Johannes Winkel, took the initiative and called for contingent conscription, also known as the “Swedish model”. All young people should be examined. Then only as many should actually have to join the Bundeswehr as are currently needed. The application committee initially wanted to moderate this. Their representative Ines Claus said that it was about day-to-day politics and therefore conscription was not an issue for the basic program.
Daniel Günther intervenes
This caused some dissatisfaction with the CDU parliamentary group leader in the Hessian state parliament. Daniel Günther, Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein, spoke out and criticized. The question of compulsory military service was by no means a matter of daily politics, he said. He sees “zero contradiction” to the plans to introduce a year of social service that could also be completed in the Bundeswehr. But you need time for that. “We don’t have that,” he said, referring to the threat from Russia.
The problem is that the Basic Law would have to be changed in order for general service to be compulsory. This in turn requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag. Things are different when it comes to compulsory military service. It was merely suspended in 2011 and could be reinstated with a simple majority, as Stuttgart CDU politician Christine Arlt-Palmer explained in an interview with ntv.de. Her district association also supported contingent conscription.
Defense politician Joachim Wadephul took the same line. The Inspector General of the Bundeswehr said that Germany and the NATO alliance area could be attacked by Russia in just five years. Soldiers were already missing. Although there are six operational submarines in the port of Eckernförde, there are a maximum of personnel for two. The application commission finally reacted and included contingent conscription in the draft program.
Young politicians against the concept of “equality”
The third topic that caused greater discussion was equality between men and women. It was about the term itself. Delegates like Sarah Beckhoff from the Junge Union vehemently rejected it. “Equality and equality are not the same thing,” she said. You have to differentiate. “This is what sets us apart from left-wing fantasies of equality,” said Beckhoff. It’s about equality in the initial opportunities and not about equality in the result.
In a fundamental program characterized by freedom and personal initiative, the term “equality” is a “massive blemish.” It was former Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner who opposed this view. “Should our message really be: Equality is a flaw?” she asked rhetorically to the plenary session – and the mood was immediately on her side. The motion to delete the term failed.
The final work on the policy program is the largest undertaking of the three-day meeting. The CDU only had four of them in total. The last one was published in 2007. For that reason alone, it was time for the party to become clear about its own principles. The actual reason was the election defeat in 2021 and the feeling of no longer knowing what the CDU still stands for after the Merkel years.