The name of the woman who sat in the Federal Chancellery for 16 years on behalf of the CDU and did not lose a single election remains unnamed at her party’s convention. The woman only appears once, but again not by name, only as a negative consequence of her politics. The AfD, its founding and its rise, was “a declaration of bankruptcy at the time”.
Reiner Haseloff says so, he came into office as a minister, later as Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, when Angela Merkel had just been Chancellor for a year. Ten years later, the border decision for migrants, without which the AfD might not even exist, because previously it had less than five percent voter approval. And now Haseloff’s drastic entry in history as a “declaration of bankruptcy”.
Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 created the Left, Merkel’s “We can do it” created the AfD. It took the SPD 20 years to get rid of this trauma. The CDU had enough time for this for a good two years. That makes the difference and explains why the Union has regained its old power instincts in record time.
Even Günther and Wüst are on Merz’s line
Not even Daniel Günther, who journalists call when they need quotes against Friedrich Merz, said anything good about Merkel at the party conference. And Hendrik Wüst, who complained against Merz in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, gives something like a Merz speech in front of 1001 delegates, in which the sentence is uttered: “We have to end illegal migration.” Wüst says the rabid “illegal” instead of evading into the finer “irregular,” and he says “terminate,” not regulate. North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state, is savagely ruled by the Greens.
Since becoming party leader, Merz has avoided any appreciation of Merkel. Merkel made it easy for him to ensure that the ex-Chancellor’s separation from the CDU gained a majority in the party. She didn’t come to the CDU party conference, but she went to the Green Party to pay tribute to Jürgen Trittin in a speech. At the latest, Merkel has overdrawn her CDU affront account from the CDU’s perspective.
In the Union, the anti-Greens are setting the trend
The anti-Greens are currently setting the trend in the Union. Berlin’s Governing Mayor Kai Wegner was the first to set the tone. The Greens are the party of “re-education”. Later, the election winner from Hesse, CDU head of government Boris Rhein, triumphantly lists everything that would not have been possible with the Greens in his country and explains why he threw the Greens out of the government and brought in the SPD:
The strictest gender ban in Germany, the storage of IP addresses to identify child pornographers, the significant strengthening of the police, and the more consistent deportation of those not entitled to asylum. When CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann says that no other party has internal security in as good hands as the CDU, Rhein provides the facts to back up the claim.
Michael Kretschmer also governs Saxony with the Greens. The square head of government said a big sentence at the party conference: The Greens “are no longer the party we once relied on”. There’s something regretful about it. The time when black-green was something of a promise for the younger CDU people is now finally over. Two and a half years of traffic lights were enough to turn the black-green “project” of the “Pizza Connection” into a black-green threat.
The CSU head of government was the first to smell the anti-Greens. So he stopped hugging the trees – which looked funny anyway because Markus Söder held the tree at arm’s length from the suit in the iconic photo, which is why there could never be any talk of “hugging”. While CDU leader Merz advocated keeping the Green option open for clearly tactical reasons, Söder publicly emphasized the opposite: Not with them. This Tuesday, the CSU boss is coming as a guest speaker – and finds what they in Bavaria call a “mown meadow”. Because Merz played it safe in a statesmanlike manner, the field is now free for a hall rocker like Söder.
The “enemy” is the AfD
The CDU is now anti-Green, Merkel-ignorant and its “enemy” is the AfD. The latter is about a left-wing narrative that the CDU wants to thwart. Whenever politicians from the political left bring up their invention, the “firewall,” as a warning, there is an insinuation that the CDU can be seduced. Not only because of the temptation of power, but also because the gap between “conservative” and “right-wing” is not that big.
Now the CDU chairman Merz says the AfD is the “force of decomposition”. A not entirely pure word, it comes from the totalitarian rhetoric kit of the NSDAP, which introduced “defense decomposition” into its Nazi justice system. The GDR state security used “decomposition” as a method of psychological warfare against members of the opposition.
Merz says “power of decomposition”, Wüst calls the AfD “Nazi party”. The unhistorical formula, which can certainly be read as a trivialization of National Socialism, goes unchallenged by the CDU. The 1,001 CDU delegates gave Thuringia’s state chairman Mario Vogt thunderous applause for his duel against the AfD right-winger Björn Höcke, who is now classified as a style-maker in the CDU. Merz doesn’t even greet AfD politicians when he rides the elevator with them in the Bundestag.
The AfD has currently made the CDU’s hard demarcation easier again – through the affairs of its two top candidates for the European elections, Petr Bystron and Maximilian Krah. Hardly anyone from the front row of the CDU misses the opportunity to accuse the AfD of being close to dictatorships in Russia and China.
Merz cleverly fills the dominant culture with life
A separate story should be written about Friedrich Merz’s favorite word. The CDU chairman has now added “leading culture” to the party program after he introduced it into the debate for the Christian Union more than 20 years ago. It has been controversial for so long – because the CDU has not yet understood how to charge the term positively.
Merz now cleverly names a component that other parties can hardly scandalize: Germany’s responsibility, which arises from Germany’s history. This leads to the unfortunately increasingly necessary defense of the Jews and Israel’s security as Germany’s reason of state. A certain Angela Merkel made the latter a political component of German foreign policy.
At the end of this text I would like to point out a small but subtle meanness on Merz’s part. It concerns the CDU’s top candidate for the European elections, the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Merz says von der Leyen knows that if she is re-elected, she will have to worry primarily about “security” and “competition” in Europe. Von der Leyen had planned it differently – completely differently.
She wanted to make Europe a climate model continent. Merz avoids the word “Green deal” as stubbornly as he avoids the name of the woman he wants to inherit as CDU chancellor next year.