There are more boring tasks than reporting on Friedrich Merz and Carsten Linnemann. But at some point I was standing in a kitchen in Aschaffenburg and just couldn’t keep up.
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The CDU accompanied me through my childhood. To this day, my family tells the story of how I told the principal of the elementary school about Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl shortly before I started school. And from his party, the CDU. There are also photos in some drawer at my parents’ house that show me riding the carousel with Norbert Blüm. I had a nice childhood.
In 2023, the Union has accompanied me through life again. My bosses have decided that I am not busy reporting on the FDP. And because they assume that I have a certain interest in everything bourgeois, they gave me the CDU. Reporting on Friedrich Merz as a child of the nineties? That’s fine, I thought. After all, I already had him on my radar when he was opposition leader for the first time.
Now people tend to assume that bourgeois people in general and bourgeois parties in particular are a certain slow pace. If that applies to the comeback-hungry CDU under Merz and his general secretary Carsten Linnemann, it must have passed me by. I experienced them completely differently.
The CDU and the Rolf Töpperwien questions
I went hiking with Merz in Israel, went hiking with Hendrik Wüst and followed Linnemann across Germany. Throughout the year I have always tried to keep up with the pace set by the Union and its top staff. And every time I thought: phew, now I’ve got her, Merz gave the next interview – and the game started all over again.
Yes, you read that right, games. Unfortunately, political journalism sometimes works like sports reporting. Attitude grades are distributed according to similarly nebulous criteria as an appointment to the “eleven of the day”. kicker. You can try to free yourself from it. Just like you can try to lose a few pounds after Christmas. Most of the time it doesn’t work.
So you ask yourself Rolf Töpperwien questions like: Who has won, who is deep in crisis? Does the shape curve now point upwards or downwards? Unfortunately, no real trend could be identified for the CDU for a long time. Sometimes up, sometimes down, the main thing is at a lot of speed.
Merz and the short fuse
At the end of June, my boss and I visited Friedrich Merz in the Konrad Adenauer House. The CDU chairman’s office is at the top and looks as if a cosmetic surgeon could reside there: flooded with light and discreetly furnished with light furniture. In personal conversations over the year, I have always found Merz to be extremely calm. Even then he was hanging very relaxed in his armchair. The long legs stretched out, the arms folded behind the head. He seemed like someone who definitely didn’t want to radiate nervousness.
Friends and enemies alike scoffed at his short fuse. And the situation looked like it almost always did last year: The traffic light government was extremely unpopular, but the Union did not get above 30 percent in surveys. Things should have gone even better for Merz and Co. But the CDU didn’t really know where it wanted to go – and with whom.
Merz has first access to the candidacy for chancellor. And it looked in the spring as if his grip was already very tight. Then NRW Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst wrote an application letter in the “FAZ” in the best Angela Merkel style. And Merz twitched. The government in North Rhine-Westphalia is almost as unpopular as the traffic lights, he countered. There it was, the short fuse.
What did Merz say again and when?
Merz has given many decent speeches in the Bundestag this year, solid opposition work, quite worthy of a chancellor in waiting. In between, however, he did his best to counteract this impression.
He called children of Arab origin “little pashas” and described the CDU as an “alternative for Germany with substance.” In his newsletter “#MerzMail” he certified that the Greens had a “penetrating public education attitude” and accused the media of getting votes for the AfD “with every gendered news broadcast.” The only thing to blame for the AfD’s high polls is the traffic light – and the radio stations affiliated with it. That’s what it sounded like.
When we met Merz in his office, he was still weighing up whether he should really attack the Greens so head-on. Just a few days later, he declared her the “main opponent” in the government. During the Bavarian election campaign, he just separated my adopted home neighborhood of Kreuzberg from Germany. And finally he claimed that rejected asylum seekers were taking away dentist appointments from Germans.
If I’ve learned one thing this year, it’s this: Whenever I think about giving the CDU a little credit for its comeback in a comment, Friedrich Merz throws one out again.
It’s one thing not to mix up all the Merz quotes in their chronological order. It’s a completely different thing to want to keep up with Carsten Linnemann. In July, Merz made the long-time head of the economic wing his new general secretary. And because I wanted to know how Linnemann approached his new task, I went to his first appearances at the base.
In Aschaffenburg, when visiting the sisters and brothers from the CSU, he had half an hour for me. We retreated to a narrow kitchen next to the event hall. The pretzel rolls and grain sticks were already there for the reception after Linnemann’s speech. He took a good bite. Apparently had to take the carbs wherever he could get them. Linnemann had only returned to his Berlin apartment at half past one in the morning, slept briefly, gone for a run at six, then followed a day full of appointments. It was now seven o’clock in the evening.
Linnemann told me back then that he was now wide awake when the alarm clock went off in the morning. Turn around again? No chance. Way too much to do. “I underestimated the force with which everything hit me at the beginning,” he said. I found that surprisingly honest for someone who has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009.
A restless one among the perplexed
When Merz offered him the office, Linnemann needed a few days to think about it. He was satisfied, he said in the kitchen between two rolls. He had the job he always wanted: He, who warned for years that the CDU was thematically blank, should give the party a new basic program. That was exactly his thing, working on content and initiating debates. He simply retained responsibility for the program. There was just a lot more to come. He had to get used to no longer doing everything himself. He was annoyed that “I no longer get around to answering every email in detail.”
Back then, I saw Linnemann as the perpetually restless one in a party of people who were still at a loss.
In the kitchen he dictated one idea after another into my pad. I could barely keep up. At some point I gave up and put the pen away. Linnemann can hardly calm down in such conversations. If the other person doesn’t get to the point, he interrupts. While he speaks, he always keeps moving. He gestures, clenches his Becker fist, puts one leg over the other, then the other over one. Mainstay and free leg? Not with Linnemann.
With the same energy, he presented the CDU’s new colors in the fall: Cadenabbia turquoise and Rhöndorf blue. And was a little surprised that the journalists present wanted to talk more about the visual similarities to the AfD color – and less about the “vitality, confidence and freedom” that Cadenabbia turquoise radiates.
The CDU has finally left Bonn behind
Shortly before Christmas, my boss and I were back in the Konrad Adenauer House, this time one floor below. The basic program was now ready, there was an Advent wreath on the table, Linnemann’s SC Paderborn had won. The CDU general would have had every reason to be infected by the contemplative mood. But Linnemann was sitting on the edge of his chair, directly opposite us, aggressive and energized as ever. You will read the result soon star.
The emphatically relaxed Merz, the always restless Linnemann – this is probably how things continue to go up and down with the CDU. But I have now found my rhythm with the party. If the colleagues at a friendly Hamburg magazine want to while away the days between the years with the next round of the CDU candidate for chancellor question, they can do so. I prefer to read Jürgen Rüttgers’ new book.
Only once did I have the feeling that the CDU had really completely escaped me: recently, at a press conference with Friedrich Merz, I was the only man in the room who had bothered to tie a tie that morning. Merz? Open collar. That wouldn’t have happened in Bonn’s times.