The next power struggle?
Eastern district associations want Merz as faction leader
01/22/2022, 6:00 p.m
As soon as Friedrich Merz is CDU chairman, the next power struggle becomes apparent. According to a report, East German district associations are urging Merz to take the top post in the Union parliamentary group. Ralph Brinkhaus holds it – which in his eyes should probably stay that way.
According to a report, several CDU district associations from East Germany also want to see the new federal party leader Friedrich Merz at the head of the parliamentary group. After the historically poor performance in the federal elections, the “party chair and the group chair belonged in one hand, so that the Union became visible as a strong, constructive and bourgeois opposition force,” says a letter from several district chairmen to Merz, from which the editorial network Germany (RND) quoted.
The current leader of the Union parliamentary group is Ralph Brinkhaus. After the federal elections in September, he was temporarily confirmed in office until the end of April, but made it clear at the time that he would like to keep the post afterwards. Since the official announcement of his candidacy in November, Merz has repeatedly avoided the question of a possible power struggle with Brinkhaus.
According to the RND report, the Jena CDU district chief Guntram Wothly was one of the signatories to the letter to Merz regarding the chairmanship of the parliamentary group. “We expect that we will be perceived from the east in the federal party,” he told RND. According to the report, other signatories are Saskia Ludwig, member of the Brandenburg state parliament, who belongs to the conservative wing, and the district chairman of the CDU in Schmalkalden-Meiningen, Thuringia, who had put up the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, as a federal candidate. The district chairmen are also calling for a structural reform that would allow the party base to have a say in the decisions of the CDU.
The party congress had previously elected Friedrich Merz as the new chairman with almost 95 percent of the votes that were considered valid. Silvia Breher was confirmed in the ranks of vice chairmen. The other four deputy posts were reassigned to the members of the Bundestag Andreas Jung and Carsten Linnemann, Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer and the Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Education Karin Prien.