The CDU is moving the capital to Georgia and the future to 1949. Does the party know where it wants to go or is it being governed from a greasy circulation folder?
Every week I resolve to finally write about the SPD or the Greens or the FDP again. My Apple Notes app is stacked with links, formulations and punchlines about the three traffic light parties, because I know that as a German columnist in 2023, after just two texts on right-wing extremism, you are suspected of being a left-green systemist.
Let’s be honest: I can’t afford to lose every right-wing extremist as a reader! Because that would be one in twelve Germans, as I can see from the current “Mitte study”.
And the SPD actually offered an open flank: Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser maneuvered wonderfully clumsily through the Schönbohm affair, she even cheated in order to skip the Bundestag, she apologized too late, and her treatment of her own top official raises the question of why at all someone who still has everything in his cupboard should climb down into the hellhole of public service.
Brainy, cucumber color scheme
So I really wanted to give it to the governing parties. But then came the relaunch of the CDU. And he looked like Christine Lambrecht on New Year’s Eve, but with burning hair, on a unicycle.
Marketing campaigns always end up in the forest of embarrassment if they do not reflect an actual attitude. Things go wrong when an organization urgently tries to be something different (modern) than it is (left behind) and at the same time doesn’t want to care about communication in the media-driven world. Then you brief an agency to conjure up something nice, let the intern look at the whole thing and then arrive at the presentation on time, please prepare a note, thank you.
That’s probably how it went with the CDU. A mercilessly intellectualized color scheme was thought up; somehow “Cadenabbia” and “Rhöndorf” should be based on Konrad Adenauer (vacation in Italy, place of residence), chancellor from 1949 to 1963, and at the same time point the way to the future. Hm.
Black, black, black
Things didn’t go so well. Cadenabbia is what we here in the rank and file call “turquoise” and Sebastian Kurz once used the color, which he also thought of immediately remembered smugly. The older ones remember that Kurz was once Austria’s young star, chancellor, party leader and poster boy for all conservatives. That’s how it is sometimes with rebranding. If you’re too slow, you’re betting on falling prices – or a falling short.
Then Angela Merkel had to be hectically edited into the video; she had not been taken into account in an earlier version of the video. The older ones remember: The woman was chancellor for a mere 16 years with acceptable approval ratings, but in the eyes of the right-wing CDU, i.e. the CDU, she is the party’s gravedigger. In this interpretation, the Merkel era is a long-term political crime that must now be “resolved”.
But if her face has to be in the film, the party will at least scrub Merkel’s goddamn orange away, away, away: the CDU is black, black, black again. The thought comes to mind that the CDU doesn’t want to move forward at all – just as far away as possible from the former chairwoman. Adenauer in this respect, at least in terms of time: consistent.
“Awakening, renewal, modernity”?
Then of course there was the matter of the presidential palace in Tbilisi: the agency had put it in the film as the Reichstag and no one noticed. A dome is a dome! This is of course a multi-level joke, since Friedrich Merz in Gillamoos had first circled the German demarcation around Kreuzberg: Gillamoos, the name of a folk festival, was Germany, not the dingy district in Berlin, he said at the time. So now it says: Berlin is not Germany, Tbilisi is Germany, ladies and gentlemen! Merkel once gave the CDU officials the German flag in an “anti-German” way in front of the camera ripped out of handbut at least not the capital too.
Turquoise flag against a blue sky.
(Photo: IMAGO/Chris Emil Janßen)
None of it looks like “departure, renewal, modernity”, everything looks like “old-fashioned, out-of-touch and unprofessional”. One wonders whether this is not a successful continuation of the CDU brand. It is reminiscent of the PDF with which the proud People’s Party wanted to stand up to a YouTuber with Cadenabbia-colored hair. Can the CDU no longer find anyone who knows about these things? Is the party governed from a greasy circulation folder?
The packaging is really torn up, but the contents of the package are also showing new cracks, now of all times. At around the same time, the CDU’s new thought leader, the historian Andreas Rödder, commented on how to deal with the AfD in the “Stern”. Minority governments with changing majorities are okay, says Rödder.
Dispute with the mastermind
This is the new objectivity that has characterized the CDU’s public communication since the tax vote in Thuringia. That sounds pragmatic, but given the party’s anti-Merkel orientation, it certainly leads to a wink to the right-wing extremists – especially if the traffic light parties are no longer a partner. The CDU general Carsten Linnemann immediately corrected the thought leader: “We appreciate the work that Prof. Rödder does in our program and policy commission. But we do not share his opinion on this point,” he told “Stern”.
The CDU’s compass seems to be caught in a magnetic storm, both geographically and in terms of content. Some regional associations apparently wanted to stick to the old logo today, like the one in North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, where a certain Hendrik Wüst waits for his day and innocently pushes strollers through the camera until then. Friedrich Merz should make this a true one Boss move motivated: Then he will no longer appear there, he is said to have said, according to information from “The Pioneer”.
Maybe there is at least an island of unity in the divided CDU.