Bavaria’s prime minister has reinvented himself politically several times. In this election campaign you will experience a bourgeois-conservative Markus Söder. There is a lot at stake for him – in Bavaria but also in Berlin.
Beer table instead of government bench: Anyone who wanted to see Markus Söder in the past year and a half had better chances at folk festivals than in the Bavarian state parliament. According to the SPD, the Prime Minister took part in just five of 30 plenary sessions in 2022. Only in the past few weeks has he appeared in Parliament a little more often, but rather briefly. On the other hand, the CSU leader hardly misses a single one of Bavaria’s folk festivals. According to Söder, there will have been 110 beer tents in ten months by the day of the state elections on October 8th. The opposition accuses him of “contempt for parliament,” and he himself praises his closeness to the people.
Presence throughout Bavaria is a mainstay of Söder’s election campaign. For months, the 56-year-old has been doing a mammoth workload, giving speeches, posing for selfies with citizens and shaking hands. Always nearby: a photographer. Söder’s affinity for images is notorious. The State Chancellery’s expenses for photographers are twenty times higher than at the end of the Horst Seehofer era.
Polls currently indicate that it should be enough for a new coalition of CSU and Free Voters. The personal benchmark for Söder is the comparatively weak 37.2 percent of 2018. At that time he blamed Seehofer for the CSU losses, this time he has to answer for the result himself.
A significant increase would not only be important for Söder’s authority within the CSU and in Bavaria, but also for his position of power in the Union. A value of “40 plus x”, as demanded by his long-time rival Ilse Aigner, would be an exclamation mark. Söder could then also appear self-confident in the circle of possible Union chancellor candidates. Many doubt that he would definitely stick to his no to a new attempt.
Söder draws the “We against Berlin card”
Before the 2018 state elections, the power-conscious Franconian had presented himself as an innovator, blowing a firework of ideas to set off – in 2023 he will be the keeper who will protect the Bavarian paradise from the Berlin traffic light “botch”. His main campaign promise: “Keep it up”. Whereby it is not quite clear where the “keep it up” will lead. Because Söder reinvented itself several times in these five years. After turning away from the “asylum tourism” rhetoric, Söder presented himself as a “green” tree hugger. Then he became the loudest corona fighter in the nation, later a loosening pioneer. He is currently touring through the Free State as an advocate of bourgeois-conservative politics.
As painful as it is for the CSU and its self-image to no longer sit at the government table in Berlin and thus no longer have any influence, the nationwide opposition role for Söder’s election campaign is practical. Unlike in previous years, the CSU can credibly play the “We versus Berlin card”. So Söder fires continuously against the Berlin traffic light coalition. At the same time, he punishes the Bavarian traffic light parties by ignoring them and likes to pretend that the name of his SPD challenger, Florian von Brunn, has slipped his mind. He refuses to participate in top candidate rounds.
Greens, SPD and FDP hope to get through with state political issues after all. So far, they have not been able to benefit from the reference to Söder’s unfulfilled promises (such as the grossly missed housing construction target) or his 180-degree turns (from nuclear power to term limits). The CSU boss also survived the parliamentary processing of his role in controversial mask deals and possible omissions on the second Munich S-Bahn trunk line, the costs of which are exploding. And if the prime minister identifies a topic that is popular with other parties, he quickly dismisses the demand. Because the implementation is then sometimes a long time coming, opponents mock him as the “announcement world champion”.
Problem Aiwanger
However, his current alliance partner challenges the CSU chairman more than the weakening traffic light parties. It is the declared goal of Free Voters boss Hubert Aiwanger to reach potential AfD voters with statements that earned him accusations of populism. Söder does not want to leave the field completely to him. But he has his word not to repeat a rhetorical approach to the AfD like in 2018. Aiwanger’s choice of words, according to which “democracy must be brought back”, as in a demonstration in Erding, or the statements by CDU leader Friedrich Merz on possible cooperation with the AfD in municipalities, gave Söder plenty of reason to distance himself from the right-wing populist party. He didn’t owe her.
Söder’s own staff has also recently caused unwanted debates, above all ex-Federal Minister of Transport Andreas Scheuer: There was the trip to the arch-conservative US politician Ron DeSantis, the displeasure with Scheuer’s appearance in the main route investigation committee (including criminal charges by the Greens), the 243 million euros Compensation for the failed car toll. And another ex-Federal Minister of Transport from the CSU caused a stir: Peter Ramsauer spoke up with derogatory statements about refugees. As far as possible, Söder ignored it in silence – where it seemed unavoidable to him, he distanced himself.
Overall, the CSU boss has mastered the election campaign so far without a hitch. However, since the CSU poll values are stagnating below the 40 percent mark, the question arises as to whether more is needed than a beer tent presence and simple slogans such as “Bayernkraft instead of federal frustration”.
Markus Söder can be seen today in the ARD summer interview – from 3 p.m. on tagesschau24 and on tagesschau.de. And at 6 p.m. in the report from Berlin in the first.