When the question about Hans-Georg Maaßen came up, things got agitated in the hall. “I don’t see any statements from him that contradict the basic principles of our party,” says a CDU member from Meissen. CDU leader Friedrich Merz should justify why the party now wants to kick out the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
It is Thursday evening and the CDU is holding one of its regional conferences in Schkeuditz, Saxony, where it is gathering the members’ opinions on the new CDU basic programme. Merz also has to face the questions of the base.
The CDU leader does not have many words about the party expulsion of the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution: “Maassen spoke in a derogatory language that has no place in our party,” he says. The end of intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
The conferences show how differently the base ticks
What does the CDU want to stand for? The new party program should be in place by the 2024 European elections. CDU program chief Carsten Linnemann clearly formulates his goal: not only should the party soon have a number of positions that no other party has.
He also wants to be able to wake up every party member at night and get an answer to the question of what the CDU stands for. “First second Third.”
The party is still a long way from such clarity. With the regional conferences, the party wants to involve the members. “Member’s March” is the slogan. The party has already been a guest in Pforzheim in Baden-Württemberg and in Münster in North Rhine-Westphalia, followed by Schkeuditz in Saxony on Thursday evening and Linstow in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday evening. South, West, East, North.
For the CDU there will be no parliamentary cooperation with this party anywhere in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Friedrich Merz about the AfD
The regional conferences show how differently the basis works in the regions. In Schkeuditz, Friedrich Merz considers some very fundamental announcements necessary.
First: There will be no parliamentary cooperation with the far-right AfD. You don’t get the party down with pandering. It’s all about a clear demarcation. A reminder also to those who, like in the district council in Bautzen, Saxony, think they have to agree to AfD applications.
Second: climate protection. “None of us should deny that this is a serious and major problem,” says Merz.
And third: Ukraine. In the past, the Saxon CDU Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer had called for the war in Ukraine to be frozen, had argued against the delivery of heavy weapons to the attacked country and most recently called for the destroyed Nord Stream 1 pipeline to be repaired. There are quite a few people in the East who see it the way he does.
Merz warns the members. “Of course we will never give up hope that one very distant day it will be possible again to create a political peace order in Europe with this Russia,” he said in Schkeuditz. “But before that happens, we have to stay on course. And that is: We are always on the side of freedom, the rule of law, defence, open society and democracy.” There should never be any doubt as to where the CDU stands.
There is no discussion of these points in Schkeuditz, most of the members in the room are likely to be with Merz on the matter. The hard announcements get applause. And Merz was also the preferred candidate of the base in the east for the party chairmanship.
Haseloff’s comparison with the GDR is well received in the hall
Nevertheless, others, such as Saxony-Anhalt’s Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff, with his attacks on the government in Berlin, especially the politics of the Greens, hit the nerve in the hall that evening. The big topic this evening is the planned ban on installing new oil and gas heating systems from 2024.
“We are not an experimental field,” says Haseloff. “Right here in the east, where we have seen before that an ideology tried to educate people and to help something that goes against the principle of freedom and liberality.” So Haseloff compares the policy of the traffic light government with the GDR – It goes down well in the hall.
The Thuringian CDU boss Mario Voigt accuses the traffic light of a prohibition policy. The coalition is about to gamble away the “small prosperity” that people have built up over the past 30 years. He accuses the traffic light of “socialism with Western money”.
I’m not going to campaign with exclusionitis and possibly leave scorched earth behind.
Friedrich Merz
These are tones that did not exist in Münster or Pforzheim. CDU leader Friedrich Merz, on the other hand, is trying to take a moderate course in the direction of the Greens. He wants to avoid breaking too much china and leaving the CDU without a coalition partner after the next federal election.
When asked from the audience whether, like CSU leader Markus Söder in Bavaria, he wanted to clearly rule out a coalition with the Greens, Merz said: “We have to remain able to talk. I will not campaign with exclusionitis and then possibly leave scorched earth behind.”
But a few clear statements do not make a basic program. The CDU wants to give new answers to the future of pensions and care. She wants to present her own ideas on energy security, on promoting home ownership or on wealth creation.
The basic program should be the big hit, the basis for the federal election campaign in 2025. Because the fact that the Union lost the election in 2021 – they in the CDU attribute that to the fact that the party no longer knew what it stood for.
The CDU boss does not regret his Pascha statement
At the regional conferences, the party asks its members what they think is the biggest challenge facing Germany. They can type in the answers on their cell phones. This creates a word cloud. The bigger the term, the more people named it.
In the middle in Schkeuditz there is finally “social peace”, surrounded by migration, security, climate change, education, energy transition. Climate change and migration were also the dominant terms in Pforzheim and Münster.
A topic that doesn’t appear in the word cloud, but still gets a lot of applause: political correctness. The head of the CDU economic wing, Gitta Connemann, scolds: “Away with the swear phrases, away with the gender.”
And Saxony’s Minister of the Interior, Armin Schuster, explains: “Saxons have the wonderful ability of not having a ‘political correctness filter’ in their mouths.” Some people feel patronized. “We have to formulate things more clearly for the Saxon.”
Friedrich Merz also takes this line straight away. Nationwide, the CDU leader had to take a lot of criticism after he had described the sons of migrants as “little pashas”. There was also trouble internally.
But here in the CDU-East he doesn’t have to hide for the sentence. “When I look at who gets upset when I say Pascha, I’m glad I said it,” he says. There is applause.
To home page
Source: Tagesspiegel
I have been working in the news website industry for over 4 years now, first as a reporter and then as an editor. I enjoy writing about politics news and am also an author. I try to cover a lot of different angles when it comes to my articles so that readers can get a well-rounded understanding of the story.
