Crisis in the CDU: Didn't hear the shot

The CDU is only partially a people's party, i.e. a political force that reaches all social groups. The Chancellor now also expressed this bitter realization after it was clearly no longer possible to deny it and the voters in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania turned the party into a splinter party. According to Friedrich Merz, the CDU does not have a satisfactory answer to people's worries and needs. He's absolutely right about that.

But unfortunately the process seems to be over before it even begins. Instead, the CDU is now working on the left, warming itself to its indignation against the “anti-Semitic left fringe” and thereby threatening to continue destroying not only itself, but also the political center. The party clearly did not hear the shot.

Without a doubt, the Left Party has an anti-Semitism problem. Some members openly sympathize with anti-Semitic groups or even call for the destruction of Israel. The left must exclude such people; mere confessions or distancing are not enough. But the fact that the Left Party is a thoroughly anti-Semitic party, as leading Union politicians are now suggesting, and that the lives of Jews would be threatened under a left-wing government in Berlin is a deliberate exaggeration.

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The CDU's relationship to anti-Semitism is instrumental. The fact that Merz recently described anti-Semitism as a form of xenophobia speaks for itself. The CDU is using the allegations against the Left as leverage to put the Greens and SPD under maximum pressure to enter into a coalition with their Berlin election loser.

Behind this lies the even greater fear that a red-green-red coalition could actually begin to withdraw parts of the housing stock in Berlin from the pursuit of profit, i.e. expropriate large real estate companies in return for compensation. Almost 60 percent of Berliners voted for this in a referendum. For the self-proclaimed party of the social market economy, expropriation is an absolute sacrilege, even though the Basic Law allows such a means.

Just a reminder: It was the CDU in conjunction with the FDP that sued against the Berlin rent cap, the law limiting rents, and celebrated in 2021 that the Federal Constitutional Court found them right on formal grounds. Even back then, many Berliners no longer knew where they would get the money for their accommodation.

The referendum was a reaction to the rent cap that the CDU helped overturn. Now the CDU wants to ban expropriation in order to protect investors. The Christian Democrats take their concerns seriously, while they don't give a damn about the needs of the population. In doing so, they impressively demonstrate how far they currently are from the claim of a people's party.

In its fury against the “extreme left,” the CDU also completely loses sight of the fact that the extreme right, which repeatedly refers positively to those who systematically murdered around six million Jews, is currently in the process of actually turning a federal state inside out. In Saxony-Anhalt there are initial agreements between the AfD and the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), they want to elect the state parliament president together and change the seating arrangement in parliament so that both parties sit in the middle. The Greens and the SPD should vacate their rooms in the main building.

This is a declaration of war on the democratic center. Here the CDU is not even making an attempt to oppose this seizure of power. The SPD's invitation to talks to enable a government without the AfD was rejected this week.

Unfortunately, so far the CDU has behaved exactly as the AfD imagines in a strategy paper: it polarizes and promotes separation from the left camp. The aim of the AfD is to prevent cross-camp coalitions and to establish itself as a bourgeois-conservative force in the middle. The old CDU would have just as little room in this new center as would the SPD, the Greens and the Left. And the middle would then no longer be democratic. The AfD is concerned about the whole thing - and the CDU apparently still hasn't understood that.