This party conference could not have gone better for Friedrich Merz. He had calculated a little over 80 percent approval to rate his election as party chairman a success. The delegates gave him more than 95 percent of the votes at the second digital party conference of the Union. That left him a bit speechless himself. The emotion almost overwhelmed him. When he accepted the election, Merz was close to tears. A little goosebump moment at a party conference, which was handled rather soberly because it had to take place online again.
At that moment, one could almost have forgotten that it was the third attempt that Merz was finally promoted to the top post. Before that, he had to admit defeat first to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and then to Armin Laschet. Only after the two have failed and after the Union has thoroughly messed up the federal elections last year is Merz allowed to take over the helm. In other words: He takes over a party that is on the ground.
This might not be a bad starting point for him, because now things can only go up. In his application speech, he struck the right notes for it. He showed his party a direction for opposition work that was not expected of him until recently: it is social policy in which the new chairman sees the most promising perspective for the CDU to make a name for itself.
The statement that social policy is not capitalism’s repair shop, but rather a component of the market economy, would not have been expected of the former Blackrock manager some time ago. During the internal party election campaign, he has repeatedly emphasized that Germany needs a pension system that also makes it possible for younger people to have a significant income in old age. That’s not wrong. No party has yet really dared to introduce a pension reform worthy of the name – although it is more than urgent to tackle this issue soon. And as Merz rightly remarked: The CDU is no longer a governing party and does not have to take coalition partners into consideration. That’s the good news.
Among the bad ones is that consolidating the party will take time that the party doesn’t actually have. There are four state elections this year. The first is already in March in Saarland. There, the SPD is still ahead of the party of the CDU Prime Minister Tobias Hans in polls. He is already building things up and explained in interviews on the sidelines of the party congress that in Saarland it will only be about the state’s own issues. That doesn’t exactly sound like Hans is expecting more tailwind from the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus.
The biggest conflict, however, awaits in the parliamentary group. There Ralph Brinkhaus is the leader of the parliamentary group and that until April. But Merz cannot wait that long to clarify the next important leadership question. If, as party chairman, he wants to be more than a friendly elderly gentleman who writes or has someone write the basic program, then he has to decide on the personnel for himself. Nobody knows that better than he does, and has done so for 20 years: At that time, party leader Angela Merkel ousted him from the head of the parliamentary group in order to bundle the opposition work, as she said at the time. At the time, Merz refrained from running for a fight against her. But he cannot count on Brinkhaus doing the same thing now.
The only thing that can be heard from the parliamentary group is the helpless appeal to trust that there will be a compromise. But that also means in plain language: There isn’t one yet. Brinkhaus only gave a cheerful greeting on Saturday, in which he pointed out how important the CDU’s opposition work is. He knows he can count on many in the faction. There the signs are much less pointing to a new beginning than may be the case at the grassroots level. A number of former ministers and state secretaries cavort at the top of the group. They did not go away empty-handed when it came to the committee chairs either. Friedrich Merz still has the real acid test ahead of him.