Status: 09.08.2021 7:17 p.m.
An election video of the SPD causes a sensation. The CDU asked the party to withdraw the video. The bishops’ conference also criticized the anti-Catholic polemics it contained.
The CDU has asked the SPD to forego a controversial election campaign spot. “The best thing now would be for everyone not to turn this into a big debate in the election campaign, but simply to withdraw this film,” said CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak. One should “no longer misuse a religious creed in order to campaign against others”.
In an interview with RTL that has not yet been broadcast, the CDU boss and candidate for chancellor Armin Laschet spoke up. According to the broadcaster, he said: “I was surprised by the methods that Olaf Scholz is now using to campaign for elections.”
Merz, Maaßen and Liminski
The trigger is an SPD election spot in which one CDU politician after the other emerges from a matryoshka doll. “Whoever votes for Armin Laschet and the CDU, votes …” says one voice. To the doll with the likeness of CDU economic politician Friedrich Merz, the voice continues “… a policy that makes rich richer and poor poorer”. For the doll with the face of the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, the sentence is supplemented with “… candidates who push the CDU to the right margin”.
Next comes a doll with the likeness of Laschet’s intimate partner Nathanael Liminski. Here the sentence is supplemented with “… arch-Catholic Laschet confidants for whom sex before marriage is a taboo”. This alludes to a statement made by the avowed Catholic in 2007 in the ARD-Broadcast Maischberger justified as a “personal choice”. In the program he also spoke out “against any kind of artificial contraception”. The current head of the Düsseldorf State Chancellery was still a student at the time.
“We imagined a fair election campaign to be different”
Ziemiak said: “We imagined the SPD’s commitment to a fair election campaign to be different.” Apparently it is a “new style of the SPD”. Her top candidate Olaf Scholz now has to explain “whether he wants to continue to abuse his religious affiliation, his affiliation with the Catholic faith, for a campaign in the election campaign”. The film also caused great outrage among the population.
Bishops’ conference calls spot “inappropriate”
The German Bishops’ Conference also reacted critically. Dealing with an expression of religious conviction was “inappropriate,” said a spokeswoman for the editorial network Germany. “We are promoting a fair election campaign, which should be carried out on the basis of factual issues and in dealing with the election programs.” The press spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference, Matthias Kopp, added: “In earlier election campaigns, it was good form not to engage in negative campaining. The democratic parties in Germany should absolutely adhere to this.”
Even the head of the Catholic Office in Düsseldorf, Antonius Hamers, believes it is wrong, in his own words, to discredit someone because of their beliefs. Gröhe now spoke of “intolerance”. However, he praised the fact that there are “clear critical voices about this unspeakable derailment” from the SPD and the Greens.
There had already been criticism of the spot before. The former political spokesman for the Greens, Volker Beck, described it as completely unacceptable to devalue someone’s faith in this way. The chairman of the NRW regional group of the CDU in the Bundestag, Günter Krings, told the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”: “In the post-war period, it never happened that highly personal issues and religious convictions were made the subject of political attacks.”