Germany's CDU at a crossroads
As the German electorate shifts right, 'die Union' looks to the left
Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, though closer in policy to the Tories, is the spiritual sister of Labour. A big tent party from the country’s industrial heartland with roots in the Catholic Church, ‘die Union’ forms a world unto itself, permanently gripped in some inscrutable battle for its own soul on which events outside the party have little bearing, occasionally rising to the surface when the rest of the country least expects or wants it.
Like Labour, the CDU has seen its ups and downs over the years. An electoral dry spell in the late 1990s and early 2000s prompted a season of soul-searching; the result was the CDU’s own Tony Blair in Angela Merkel, whose ballot box success owed just as much to the previous SPD government’s unpopularity as to her own political talents, following Gerhard Schröder’s controversial labour market reforms — the long-term dividends of which Merkel nevertheless reaped in the 2010s (does this sound familiar?). Like Blair, Merkel’s watchword was ‘pragmatism’; like Blair, hers was a pragmatism suited uniquely to the conditions prevalent at the outset of her ministry, which hardened into dogmatism and a personality cult when confronted with those new conditions that sixteen years in government bequeathed. Like Blair, Merkel wisely stepped down before she could be pushed, thus postponing the doubtless unpleasant, but purgative, internal reckoning with her legacy that a direct challenge to her authority would have occasioned. Labour has spent nearly two decades trying to banish Blair’s ghost from the attic; the CDU, having only had five years since the grey lady’s departure, has a livelier poltergeist on its hands.
Friedrich Merz was supposed to be the CDU’s Jeremy Corbyn; a paladin of the party’s old guard called up from deep within the mists of time (having been a rival to Merkel to succeed Helmut Kohl around the turn of the millennium) to turn back the clocks on the ex-chancellor’s reforms. He had the support of the CDU’s actual pragmatists; the laissez-faire wing that supports a rollback of Merkelian net zero legislation, a tougher line on immigration, and a quiet rapprochement with the AfD. These he dazzled with promises to address Germany’s creaking pension and benefits systems, first announcing an ultimately fruitless ‘autumn of reforms’, then delivering a similarly infertile late winter/early spring of change, and now hinting at a summer of transformation before the Bundestag goes into recess. Time and time again he has overestimated the cooperativeness of his coalition partner, the SPD, who, as they slide down the polls to depths not seen since Bismarck banned them at the end of the nineteenth century, have shed their former character as a big tent party and are increasingly beholden to their most radical stalwarts.
The CDU, too, is undergoing a similar radicalisation spiral as it slides down the polls (currently at an all-time low of 22%) and sheds members (a 2% decrease this year alone). The locus of this radicalisation is not the party’s conservatives, who have never been weaker, but the Merkelians. Unlike the SPD, whose materialist worldview translates neatly into concrete budget items, the CDU’s ideology under Merkel (which has no greater devotee than, quite ironically, her old opponent, the current Chancellor) became abstract and nebulous, encompassing a shallow conservatism predicated on a respect for democracy, an emotional attachment to the German state and its institutions, and a belief that these values alone are sufficient to manage the world’s third-largest economy (one is reminded of another thin-skinned solicitor who believes his country can be run solely on the Nolan Principles). The post-Merkel CDU’s raison d’être is the defence of the state; this in turn requires the state to have an enemy. This Merz and his allies have found in the AfD, which current polling suggests will be the next Bundestag’s largest party.
Like Labour, the CDU finds itself trapped between the Scylla of its base and the Charybdis of the broader electorate. A recent poll commissioned by the tabloid Bild showed that, while a hypothetical CDU/AfD coalition was the most popular option amongst all voters, 48% of self-identified CDU supporters favoured a possible coalition with the Left Party over such an outcome (27%) — a very real possibility in East Germany, where most polls place the latter just shy of a majority. The CDU, were it ready to enter such a coalition, would slip from its current ≈22% to 17.5%. Given the general right-wing bent of the German electorate and its increasing openness towards the AfD’s ideas, it is hard to see the greater freedom of manoeuvre the CDU would enjoy by looking to its right for majorities failing to translate into the broad, mainstream appeal that it currently lacks. Yet the CDU’s disproportionately elderly (even by the standards of a greying German electorate) voter base, its eyes glued to Germany’s heavily left-leaning public television and legacy media, believes the rather undifferentiated picture they paint of the AfD as unreconstructed nazis. In this they are in concord with the party’s apparatchiks, reluctant to risk the ire of their social milieu in Berlin by sealing a pact with the populists.
Here, again, one might draw parallels to Labour, whose strategists appear to have settled on minimising the extent of their predicted wipeout at the next election by forfeiting the centre ground in order to shore up their support amongst the party base. The avatar of this latest search for the party’s soul is Andy Burnham, an old Blairite with a regional accent who has built himself up as a local nabob in the Labour heartlands far from the watchful eye of the Westminster news hounds. The CDU has its own Burnham in the form of Hendrik Wüst, the affable governor of the CDU’s own spiritual heartland in North Rhine-Westphalia (or colloquially ‘NRW’). Amidst Merz’s woes, Wüst telegraphed his leadership ambitions last week with a state visit to Poland, where he took the unusual step of inviting a sizeable Berlin press delegation. This he capped off with a gesture carefully calibrated to curry favour with the CDU’s historically conscious activist core — a trip to Auschwitz, where his social media team snapped a photograph of the politician smiling his big, aspirational grin in front of the former death camp’s main gates. Wüst has thus far denied any ambition to replace Merz; my own sources in the CDU say that, while the Chancellor is safe for the time being, the party’s central office has already planned Wüst’s triumph and will airlift him in if, as is not entirely improbable, the current coalition shortly falls apart.
There is little substantial difference between Wüst and Merz on policy; where they part is on rhetoric, especially on migration and multiculturalism, where Wüst strikes a softer tone than the abrasive Merz, who has an unfortunate talent for framing the most innocuous opinions in the most offensive way possible. Like Burnham, Wüst has thus far faced little media scrutiny. This is a pity, because Wüst is a far stranger and more interesting politician than his convivial public persona suggests. Just like Labour’s great Mancunian hope, Wüst is a power hungry but intellectually vapid man who spent decades in search of his own political identity: before assuming the governorship in 2021, he had associated himself with his party’s right; since then, he has continued his predecessor (and former CDU chancellor hopeful) Armin ‘Turkish Armin’ Laschet’s neo-Merkelian line of cuddly environmentalism and showy tolerance of ethnic minorities. The strategist behind Laschet’s policy was his chief of staff Nathanael Liminski, who has stayed on as the grey eminence in Wüst’s administration. Under Liminski’s guidance, the CDU in NRW has sought to establish itself within the Turkish community and cultivated unusually close ties with Ankara — Wüst met the Turkish foreign minister (and former intelligence chief) Hakan Fidan in Berlin before departing to Poland, and has courted scandal in the past by speaking at official functions of the DİTİB, the German section of Turkey’s Directorate for Religious Affairs. There is something darker going on here than mere misguided liberal tolerance.
Liminski is an odd man to find himself a Boss Tweed to the Rhineland’s Turks. The eighth son of an ultramontane journalist and Opus Dei member, Liminski first ventured into the public sphere as a traditionalist Catholic activist who denounced premarital sex on Berlin’s political talk shows. It is easy to see in this one-time firebrand a flesh and blood version of Robert Rediger, the former identitarian in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission who converts to Islam and becomes rector of the Sorbonne under the Islamist government. Liminski’s ambitions stretch far beyond the state chancellery in Düsseldorf: he has already tried to put one former Rhenish governor into the chancellor’s office, and with Wüst he now has a more photogenic, media-friendly vessel than the gaffe-prone Laschet. Unlike Merz and his cronies, Liminski has the brainpower and the political capital to steer the party in a new direction. It would be a strange thing indeed if the final release from the Merkel years lay in Liminski’s green, Rhineland Islamodroitisme; if this heir to the old Catholic Centre Party’s final act were, as one anonymous German professor put it to me, ‘to avenge Rome’s defeat in the Kulturkampf with Mecca’s victory’.
But this fate may yet be averted, for Liminski has one very obvious achilles heel: he is a hideously ugly little man with zero charisma, whose personal views are noxious to the electorate and the media class — hence why he needs the preening Wüst, who has little mind of his own, to carry him into the chancellor’s office. It would take minimal effort on behalf of a seasoned spinner to whip up a smear campaign that would force the squeaky-clean, image-conscious governor to distance himself, leaving the mechanical Turk to carry on the game without his dwarf.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you wish to support what we do, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?