The next power struggle?
The first district associations want Merz as parliamentary group 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, several district associations are urging Merz to take the top position in the Union parliamentary group. Ralph Brinkhaus holds it – which in his eyes should probably stay that way.
A group of 17 CDU district chairmen from Thuringia, Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia has demanded that the future party leader Friedrich Merz also take over the chairmanship of the parliamentary group. After the historically poor performance in the federal election, 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) and the news portal “ThePioneer” quoted. Overall, the CDU has more than 300 district associations.
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. Brinkhaus is initially elected until April 30th.
The then CDU leader and later Chancellor Angela Merkel had ousted Merz in 2002 as group leader. The television station “Welt-TV” Merz, whether he would hurt Brinkhaus as much as the then CDU chairwoman did in 2002: “Friedrich Merz doesn’t hurt anyone, we talk rationally to each other.” The topic is not on the agenda today.
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.