Anyone who used to be a tinker practiced an honorable trade: repairing pans, pots or kettles. Today there is hardly any talk of this profession. It is all the more astonishing that the tinkers are currently making a comeback, at least in the rhetoric of the CSU. Secretary General Martin Huber blasphemes about the “traffic light federal government that fights like tinkers on all issues”. CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt also believes that only “the tinker family” is left of the Berlin coalition, which initially presented itself as a “happy family”. Somehow everyone in the CSU is now talking about the tinkers. Noticeable, but not really an issue. If it wasn’t for this paper.
The guide that the members of the CSU Bundestag have missed is less than one and a half pages long – on “dealing with the traffic light coalition,” as the headline says. The internal paper that the Süddeutsche Zeitung is available, is a guide to dismantling the political competition, specifically: the federal government of SPD, Greens and FDP. An argumentation aid for the CSU parliamentarians and apparently also for the whole party. Seven key points, plus crisp slogans. Point three (“The traffic light is a coalition of disputes”) says, for example: “After seven months of traffic lights, there’s nothing left of ‘We are family’, just a family of tinkers with quarrels, quarrels, quarrels.” Well, what’s ringing?
It is not uncommon for parties, not just the CSU, to draw up strategy papers, also with a view to political opponents. It is less common for such papers to find their way into the public domain. We don’t want to give the impression that what appears to be factual criticism of the competition is just clumsy campaign rhetoric. The CSU paper does not skimp on factual criticism – it only provides an insight into the strategic machine room of the party. “As the CSU in the Bundestag, we are the counter-model to the traffic light,” it says. The following are the seven theses that the MPs are supposed to peddle, including: “The traffic light does not deliver” (point one) or “The traffic light crisis management is bad” (point four). There was a risk of “record debts”, the federal government was “a left-wing project with the support of the FDP”, that’s also in there.
Or this work order here, point seven: “Emphasize the Bavarian agenda of the CSU”. This also includes the instruction to quote a single sentence by the Green Party leader Thomas von Sarnowski. “Representing regional interests is old thinking,” he said recently, according to media reports. According to the CSU paper, this evocation of national responsibility for politics should be used as an argument that the Greens should not bear any responsibility in Bavaria. You can see: Everything already smells like state election campaigns in these summer weeks. The election will not take place until autumn 2023.
Normally, such argumentation aids are available directly before elections. For the 2021 federal election, for example, the then CSU general secretary Markus Blume gave his campaigners ten points against each party – SPD man Kevin Kühnert discussed “unopposed” the expropriation of BMW, things like that. In the 2018 state election campaign, arguments against the FDP caused a stir. The liberals, it was reproached, presented schoolchildren “offensively” with same-sex partnerships as a “normal family model”. Julika Sandt, deputy leader of the FDP parliamentary group in the state parliament, heard about the current guide and is amazed at the early point in time: “Apparently the CSU is already panicking about an election defeat”. But she is relaxed: “In 2018 we made the children gay, this year the traffic light will herald the fall of the republic,” says Sandt – it’s more like cabaret.