Just a few weeks ago, Uwe Brandl won another election: on January 1, after two years as vice-president, he will be at the top of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities for the second time, and his term of office will then run until mid-2025 Brandl has been a member of the Bavarian Municipal Council since 2002, and he is elected here until 2026. After that, however, he will also have to give up these two posts in the central municipal associations, because they are indirectly linked to an office for which he no longer wants to apply in the coming year. Brandl says he will no longer stand as a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election in Abensberg. However, it is anything but certain that his Abensberger CSU would have put him up again after almost 30 years in office.
Just two weeks ago, CSU local chairman Daniel Ritz sent a letter to all party members in the town of 14,000 residents in the Lower Bavarian district of Kelheim, which Brandl has ruled since 1993. Brandl stated that he would not compete again in 2023, the letter said. His work will be “appreciated at the appropriate place and in due course”. A call to the Ritz would be a good opportunity. “Uwe Brandl has done an incredible amount for Abensberg in the last three decades,” says the local chairman and emphasizes: “The CSU local branch in Abensberg has no problem with Uwe Brandl.” Only now, for the first time in a long time, there are other members who are interested in the office. Hence the party’s public call to apply for the candidacy. If Brandl wanted to compete again for the CSU, he could throw his hat in the ring, “just like everyone else”.
According to Brandl, he will not do that. Just like Ritz, he also emphasizes that there is no rift between him and the CSU. However, the mayor apparently no longer agrees with some members of the Christian Social city council group – especially not on questions of political style, as Brandl himself affirms. Some apparently wanted to be mayors themselves, pursued their own and individual interests and suddenly questioned council decisions in which they themselves were involved. If a working group like a city council simply no longer works in parts, then there are only two options, says Brandl: adapt or draw the consequences.
But adapting was never the thing of the pugnacious Brandl, who was endowed with considerable self-confidence. He has come a long way as a speaker for the municipalities, but has not had a great career in the CSU. The 62-year-old himself says that he was “never such a die-hard party politician”. Because anyone who dares to articulate their own opinion is often “punished relatively quickly” and “his position in the pack” is made clear. As far as his position in the Kelheimer Kreis-CSU is concerned, Brandl has no longer been one of the leaders. His close political male friendship with district chairman Martin Neumeyer, who also comes from Abensberg, soon broke up after he moved from the state parliament to the office of district administrator in 2016. Where the dispute in the city revolves around a school renovation and the fire station, the circle is about finances and the clinics.
In 2020, Brandl was re-elected to the district council, but no longer for the CSU, but for a group called “Stadt-Land-Union”. As far as his successor as mayor is concerned, Brandl would support a candidacy for his current deputy, Bernhard Resch. According to Ritz, he is also a CSU member. On the city council, however, he sits for the district list “Landwahler Offenstetten”.