The CDU is looking for a new chairman, and Friedrich Merz is there again. He presents himself very differently than you know it from him. Even a representative of the other wing does the change for him.
Friedrich Merz failed twice, mainly because of himself, according to a widespread and probably not entirely wrong assessment. At the party conference in Hamburg in 2018, when he wanted to become CDU chairman for the first time, he gave a surprisingly bad speech. In the end, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was elected. Merz had overestimated himself and left the field as a loser. At the online party conference in January 2020, his speech was okay, but Armin Laschet’s was much better. Laschet was elected. Merz had underestimated him, the result was the same.
Now that the second successor to long-time party leader Angela Merkel has failed, Merz is already running again. Why? This question is the last he will be asked in a digital application round on Monday evening. Friends and family would have asked him that too, Merz replies, “I’ve thought about it for a long time”. Especially after the last federal party conference, “where I didn’t win again”, he asked himself for a few weeks, “Do you want to do it again or not”.
Merz admits that something like this has never happened in the history of the CDU, and probably not in any other German party. “But I admit it,” he says and laughs: “Yes, there is something irrational about it, if you will.” He couldn’t just say no, “when so many members and so many friends, party friends in the party, outside the party, ask me: Do that again.”
CDU should become family-friendly
One and a half hours have passed when he gives this answer, and Merz has already taken the penultimate hurdle on his third way to the CDU chairmanship. In three separate rounds, the three candidates have the opportunity to introduce themselves to the base, at least to that part of the base who takes the trouble to listen to the event. Norbert Röttgen is next Wednesday, the next day Helge Braun has his appearance.
As with the presentation of his new ambitions last week, Merz presents himself completely differently than the clichés that are circulating about him lead one to expect. “I want all of us to enjoy being in this party again,” he says. He wants to involve young people, he wants to work “vehemently” for young women. He stressed that the CDU had too few women in the party, in the governing bodies and in the parliaments. He wants to make the CDU a family-friendly employer so that “women, including men” can better combine their work with private life. When asked why one should become a CDU member now, he replies: “Because this is going to be an exciting, debating, interesting party that is developing alternatives out of the opposition.” The CDU “becomes” such a party, apparently it is not at the moment.
When asked about climate policy, Merz initially said that he was not sure whether the traffic light coalition would break up quickly, as the questioner had suggested as a suspicion. “I think they deserve a chance to do well and maybe even better than the coalition that is coming to an end.” He criticizes the free trade agreement with the South American Mercosur states, which also includes Brazil headed by the right-wing radical Jair Bolsonaro, and asks whether “it is not a bad instrument for overcoming our climate crisis”. A year ago Merz had called for a “realistic trade policy” that does not focus on environmental protection and occupational safety first, but on customs policy.
With the welfare state, the old Merz sounds through
Now Merz says he is basically a supporter of free trade agreements. The Mercosur agreement, however, is “a long way off”, also for reasons of climate policy. The necessary approval of the European Parliament or the Bundestag would not be given at the moment, “I would not support it either”. It makes no sense for Germany to make an effort in terms of climate policy and for Brazil to do what it wants.
Only when he talks about the welfare state does Merz sound like it used to, but anything else would be asking too much. He has been interested in the subject for a long time, he emphasizes. The moderator asks him the question in such a way that he could also present himself as a social politician, but Merz awards the penalty offer in the empty goal. He talks about high expenses and problems. Here a foil shines through that his critics reproach him with: that of the neoliberal who was arrested in the 1990s.
That this Merz image was wrong, had recently attested to him, of all people, a CDU politician who is considered to be left in the wing logic of the Union, who appeared a few years ago as a sharp critic of the Union of Values, to which Merz never belonged, in which he was but had loyal followers at the time. “He knows that he has to compete with a fairly diverse team,” said Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister of Education and Culture Karin Prien in an interview with ntv.de: “You would underestimate Friedrich Merz if you assume that he thinks with neoliberal ideas The 90s could bring the CDU forward again. That doesn’t do him justice. ” This is not “endorsement”, as the official support in US election campaigns is called, and Prien is also not part of Merz’s team, even if he once briefly mentions her as a discussion partner on questions of education policy. But the sentences show that things are in motion in the CDU.
Of course there is still old Merz – not only on the subject of the welfare state, but also at the ECB, which must now recognize that the time has come to get out of the “easy money policy”. Or when it comes to the EU’s external borders: To the extent that Europe removes the internal borders, the external borders must be protected – in other words: sealed off. He describes himself as a friend of the Bundeswehr and praises the North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Herbert Reul for his actions against clans.
In “CDU Live” with Merz, a lot is about membership participation, which Merz would like to significantly expand – but more in the sense of an exchange, not necessarily through the expansion of member surveys. Merz wants to have a new basic program drawn up by 2024; He does not mention the work started by Kramp-Karrenbauer and not finished due to Corona.
At the end of the evening, the moderator said that more than 2800 members had registered via the CDU’s “event platform” and that there were over 7000 viewers in the live stream. However, the CDU has almost 400,000 members. It should be a few more when all three candidates appear together on December 1st. That is the last hurdle they all have to overcome. The chances are good that Merz will not have to give a speech.