Saturday, October 16, 2021
Lash at the Junge Union
“I am responsible for the election campaign”
CDU leader Laschet faces the party youth after the election defeat. In Münster he takes responsibility for the election defeat and advises the Union to adopt tough opposition policies. When describing the state of the Union, he opposes Merz.
CDU boss Armin Laschet has assumed sole responsibility for the result of the union in the federal election. “As chairman and candidate for chancellor, I am responsible for this result,” he said at the Junge Union’s Germany Day in Münster. “I am responsible for the election campaign and the campaign, and nobody else.” He went on to speak of a bitter result.
Laschet spoke out in favor of a clear error analysis of what was wrong in terms of personnel and content. He opposed the quick analysis of ex-parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz. “I do not share the view that we are a restructuring case,” said Laschet. “We had a good program.” The day before, Merz had said before the new generation of the party that “with this election result, the Union has become a serious political restructuring case at risk of insolvency”.
Laschet looked cautiously at the paper at the end of the explorations by the SPD, FDP and the Greens for a possible coalition. “The traffic light paper is fine, we could have done a lot,” he said, and advocated saying “not right at the beginning” that everything was bad. There is “a lot of good things in it, a lot is claused” and a lot is not clear to him, “how they want to resolve it”. “We will measure them by actions and not by twelve pages of exploratory paper,” he said.
He warned the party against becoming “shrill” in the opposition. As in 1998, the Union could recover quickly after the severe defeat if it positioned itself correctly. He criticizes the indiscretions from the CDU and CSU during the explorations. If you don’t want a Jamaica alliance, you should have said so openly.