Friedrich Merz, 66, won the triathlon for the CDU chairmanship: 1 full year swimming, 1 full year running, 1 tiring year cycling – exactly in this order. But perseverance and tenacity have paid off. As a multimillionaire, Merz could also afford this competition. And so the party congress directors can put on the old Udo Jürgens hit in January: “At 66, that’s where life begins”.
Two old men are particularly happy about the clear result for their Friedrich: Merz’s biological father Joachim and his political foster father Wolfgang Schäuble. Because Joachim Merz, a committed CDU member in the Hochsauerland district association for decades, was so disgusted by the “mediocrity” of the Merkel CDU that he left the party after 51 years. He thought his CDU was on the direct path to socialism. Will he now, at almost 98 years of age, come back?
Wolfgang Schäuble in luck
Wolfgang Schäuble also had to wait a long time for this moment of happiness. He, who had campaigned for Merz early on and wanted to see him as his successor in the parliamentary group chairmanship, failed like so many because of Angela Merkel’s claim to power. At 79 he is now experiencing late satisfaction. And with the few survivors of the legendary Andean Pact, that Catholic-West German CDU men’s union from the previous century, the champagne corks are likely to have popped. The Protestant “foreign rule” could finally be shaken off!
The Merkel era is over sooner than many observers would like to believe. The admiration that journalists in particular showed the eternal Chancellor had recently become rather stale in the party. Only twelve percent of the voting members voted for their Chancellery Minister Helge Braun, a clear indication of how tired one was of the boss. Because with its cross-camp, or better: camp-oppressive way of doing politics, things had gone steeply downhill for the Union in recent years, from 41.5 percent in the federal elections in 2013 to 32.9 percent in 2017 to an embarrassing 24.1 percent in 2021. Worse the Union has never done it in its 72-year history. Friedrich Merz, the “anti-Merkel”, rightly called the result a disaster: the German Christian Democracy was a “serious political restructuring case at risk of insolvency”. Almost two thirds of the voting CDU members apparently consider Merz to be a suitable renovator.
What does this mean for the CDU and German politics?
A look abroad may help. In the USA, France, Spain, Italy and many other countries, the Christian Democrats and Conservatives are now under double pressure: in the middle, market-compliant neoliberals are fighting against the socio-politically open-minded bourgeoisie, right-wing national-conservative, right-wing populist and even right-wing extremist parties are increasingly operating. who no longer have any respect for diaper-soft conservatives. Merz will try to tap the voter reservoir of both groups, and that will only work if he can serve right-wing and neoliberal positions at the same time. He has to locate the intersection of the FDP and AfD, their common antipathy against “left-green state regulation mania” to work out and then drive the two parties in front of him. Can it work?
Is the AfD taboo falling?
In contrast to what has sometimes appeared in the past few years, Merz is an excellent speaker. He gets to the heart of things (from his point of view), he speaks plain text and doesn’t mess around like the Greens, he’s not as smurfy and emotionless as Scholz and he will tease and pester Christian Lindner again and again about his new friends until they FDP – as in 1982 – ruefully returns to the CDU.
Unlike Merkel, Merz will try to collect the scattered “bourgeois camp”, and Merz also includes a notable part of the AfD in addition to the FDP. It will be exciting to see how the AfD and FDP try to evade this double strategy of embracing and strangling: a serious turn by the FDP to left-wing liberalism and the socio-national radicalization of the AfD appear just as possible as the liberation of the FDP from the traffic lights and the Gradual removal of taboos from black and blue collaborations. How the FDP and AfD react to Merz’s advances depends crucially on the strategic skill of the new party leadership and their art of not stepping into every faux pas. On this point Merz is far more insensitive and less stable than Merkel, and his opponents will be able to mercilessly exploit this weakness.
Rejoice, you leftists
But restraint is the order of the day. Until the party congress in January, Wolf Merz will still eat pounds of chalk, and as long as the pandemic continues, the change in strategy from Merkel to Merz will hardly be noticeable. In times of crisis, Germany has no political parties; in times of crisis, cohesion is the first civic duty. Friedrich Merz will not change that either. But after the crisis, the fundamental difference between Merkel’s cross-camp policy and Merz’s camp-building policy will become clear.
This is good news for the left.
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