If you had to sort the ranks of the previous CSU general secretaries according to their function and political importance, there is a rough grid: the time before Franz Josef Strauss, the time under Franz Josef Strauss and the time after Franz Josef Strauss. Strauss himself was the first general secretary, serving from 1949 to 1952. When Strauss became head of the CSU in 1961, Friedrich Zimmermann was general secretary and held the post until 1963. Zimmermann, one of the most dazzling figures in the history of the CSU, was later Strauss’ right-hand man in Bonn as head of the regional group, which by no means meant that he always saw himself as a loyal vicarious agent.
The General Secretaries after Zimmermann, the two state politicians Anton Jaumann and Max Streibl, left no particular traces, which was also due to the fact that they were not among Strauss’s close confidants.
Basically, the office only gained its true meaning when Gerold Tandler became CSU general secretary in 1971. The trained bank clerk was one of Strauss’s closest associates and held the position twice. To a certain extent, the job profile of a CSU general secretary under Strauss was born under Tandler. In addition to an efficient organization of the party, unconditional personal loyalty to Strauss and crude attacks on political opponents of all kinds, which also included party friends from the CDU suspected of being left-wing deviants, were required. Tandler himself always saw himself as a manager at the Strauss company and not as a party soldier for the CSU.
As CSU general secretary, Gerold Tandler (here in 2000) saw himself primarily as a manager at the Strauss company and not as a party soldier.
(Photo: Stefan Kiefer/dpa)
The member of parliament Bernd Protzner (here 1996) was probably the most unlucky one among the CSU general secretaries.
(Photo: Tim Brakemeier/dpa)
Thomas Goppel was able to celebrate a grandiose electoral success as CSU General Secretary, he was rewarded with the post of Minister for Science and Art.
(Photo: Nestor Bachmann/dpa)
Tandler’s successor, Edmund Stoiber, also perfectly embodied the dual role as the loyal paladin of Strauss and the “Attack Department”, as Uli Hoeneß once described his role at FC Bayern. At that time, Stoiber was considered the “blonde guillotine” of the CSU, always ready to throw himself before his lord and master. Strauss once said of Stoiber that he kept his head where it could cost him.
After Strauss’ death in 1988, things became more difficult. Shortly before, Erwin Huber had become General Secretary, who then found himself in an area of tension between the new CSU boss Theo Waigel and Max Streibl, Strauss’s successor as Prime Minister, which was difficult to manage. Striebl fought a bitter duel with Waigel, which the media likes to describe as a “nose ahead game”. When Striebl finally had to resign in 1993 as part of the so-called “Amigo Affair”, Stoiber became his successor and an unusual career window opened up for Huber. He became a confidante of Waigel, who shared an intimate party enmity with Stober, which was at least as intense as later the dislike between Horst Seehofer and Markus Söder, head of Stoiber’s state chancellery. Huber had thus managed the rare feat of changing political hosts without being harmed.
For the new CSU general secretary, however, it didn’t get any easier, on the contrary. Waigel appointed the member of parliament Bernd Protzner and thus went horribly wrong. Protzner was not only stuck between the melancholic Waigel and the hot-headed Stoiber, but also had to struggle with his own communicative shortcomings. In addition, as a member of the Bundestag, he was far away from Munich, where Stoiber and the very powerful parliamentary group at the time defined the political issues of the CSU. Protzner was probably the most unlucky of all general secretaries.
When after the resignation of Theo Waigel all power in the CSU was again in one hand, namely with Stoiber, the role of the general secretary also changed. He was now more the secretary again, because everything important was decided in Stoiber’s state chancellery anyway. So it didn’t really matter that Protzner’s successor, Thomas Goppel, wasn’t necessarily a political powerhouse who became Secretary General. Waigel once derided his propensity for enigmatic box sentences at a party conference as “cryptic but of a high standard”. But Goppel was able to show something that is the most important indicator for every CSU general secretary: electoral success. With him as General Secretary, the CSU won a two-thirds majority in the 2003 state elections. This is how you climb the career ladder in the CSU and because Goppel can pass as a political esthete with a lot of benevolence, he became Minister for Science and Art.
Christine Haderthauer (here in 2014) was the only woman on the post so far. However, she was not very lucky.
(Photo: Peter Kneffel/dpa)
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was Secretary General for a short time in 2009 and then quickly rose to become Federal Minister of Economics.
(Photo: Tobias Hase/dpa)
Alexander Dobrindt organized two successful election campaigns and then moved up to the Federal Cabinet.
(Photo: imago)
This was followed by a kind of relapse into the old days. A young general secretary stepped in, devoted to his boss Stoiber with almost boundless admiration and at the same time full of ambition and equipped with the necessary unscrupulousness: Markus Söder. It was almost like it used to be under Strauss: a hardliner in the CSU headquarters, who reached out vigorously and was not afraid of all kinds of populist maneuvers. Luckily for Söder, as general secretary he didn’t have to organize a state election campaign, but was able to get into the cabinet of Stoiber’s successor, Günther Beckstein, in good time.
The full force of the 2008 election defeat therefore hit Söder’s successor, Christine Haderthauer, the only general secretary the CSU had to date. Unlike Goppel, Haderthauer got to know the other side of the coin during her one-year tenure: whoever loses has to go. After all, they found a place in the cabinet of the new CSU sole ruler, Horst Seehofer.
Alexander Dobrindt showed how much a CSU general secretary is measured by success in the state elections. He followed the new CSU star Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who became Federal Minister of Economics after less than four months. Dobrindt organized two successful election campaigns for the CSU at federal and state level in 2013, and the CSU regained the absolute majority of seats in the state elections. So he was rewarded – with the office of Minister of Transport in Berlin. His successor Andreas Scheuer then saved his skin despite the election failure. After the bitter losses in the 2017 federal elections, he succeeded Dobrindt as Minister of Transport, an appointment that still weighs heavily on the CSU to this day.
Markus Blume (right) was initially the deputy of CSU General Secretary Andreas Scheuer and then took over his post.
(Photo: Andreas Gebert/dpa)
While Scheuer’s successor, Markus Blume, is an eloquent urban figure, he may not have been the ideal person to halt the CSU’s decline with its conservative rural clientele. After the devastating losses in the federal elections and lousy poll numbers, Söder sought his salvation in a major revival, and Blume ended up in the cabinet as science minister.
After the resignation of Stephan Mayer, Söder has to look for a new general secretary again. It won’t be easy. Mayer was already considered an emergency appointment because the parliamentary faction, from whose ranks the office should actually be filled in view of a difficult state election campaign, is not exactly a pool of talent. And the polls are still lousy.