After the bankruptcy in the 2018 election, Markus Söder announced an honest analysis. Five years later, his CSU is in even worse shape. It’s not just Söder’s future that is more uncertain than ever.
For Markus Söder it’s hair-raising. The CSU leader has completed countless appointments in Bavaria, and this year alone there will be 110 appearances in festival tents and rallies before the state elections on October 8th. But despite the immense effort, the CSU remains far short of its own expectations in recent surveys, with mostly only 36 percent. The CSU cannot benefit from the historically poor approval ratings for the traffic light government in the federal government. The Free Voters (17 percent) and the AfD (13 to 14 percent) recently achieved up to 31 percent.
Anyone looking for the reasons for Prime Minister Söder and his CSU’s dilemma is currently happy to hear the keyword “leaflet affair”. Söder himself also describes the Free Voters’ soaring as a “fever curve of solidarity”. Many people in Bavaria expressed solidarity with the anti-Semitic leaflet from Aiwanger’s school days in the wake of the affair. The AfD, in turn, is benefiting from the high nationwide polls in the Free State, but is clearly lagging behind the values in many other countries.
While the numbers make many CSU members nervous, Söder is trying to remain calm on the outside: “It’s nice to be happy about surveys, but nobody should be happy too early. Things always turn out completely differently than you think,” he said at the beginning of the week the meeting of the CSU board. According to reports, the poor poll numbers only played a role in the back of people’s minds.
The explanations about Free Voters and AfD are certainly not wrong – but anyone who wants to use them to completely analyze the situation of the CSU is ignoring Söder’s responsibility. Many in the party also know this – but so far they have only said it behind closed doors. As always, the CSU stands united behind its party leader until the election.
It remains to be seen whether this will also be the case after October 8th. A worse result than in 2018 (37.2 percent) would definitely be a burden – no one can say whether things would then be difficult for Söder. After all, it is said that the CSU is in an even worse position as an opposition party after the Union’s bankruptcy in the federal government in 2021. Söder is lucky that there is no Söder waiting for his chance behind him. Nevertheless, Söder’s ambitions for a federal political career, which may still have been hidden in secret, will then have resolved themselves.
Söder’s course
But back to the CSU: It is said that Söder has permanently unsettled the party and many of its members with his previous changes of course. “Today we no longer know what the CSU stands for, and certainly not what it will stand for in a year,” is how a party executive describes the criticism that he says he often hears from the base during the election campaign.
What is specifically mentioned in this context is Söder’s former hardliner course in the 2018 election campaign, when he allowed himself to be carried away with statements such as “asylum tourism” and an open conflict with then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in order to poach voters who were loyal to the AfD. Even back then before the election, the CSU was polling between 33 and 35 percent.
After the “political near-death experience,” as Söder retroactively called the shift to the right, he ordered himself and the CSU to shift to the left back to the center. Climate and species protection were suddenly the “mega topics”. A photo from July 2019, when he hugged a tree in the park behind the State Chancellery, became a symbol of the new Söder. At that time, Söder also advocated for a mandatory quota for women on CSU district boards.
But no matter how hard Söder tried, there was increasing resistance within the party. The women’s quota was rejected by the delegates at the party conference, and many in the party still do not forgive him for his greener course. But Söder stuck to the new compass, the CSU had to become more modern and prepare itself for the changing society. “If you don’t move with the times, you move with the times,” he explained the course at the time, saying there was no alternative.
Power struggle and election campaign
Only when the CSU in Bavaria was heading for a record bankruptcy before the 2021 federal election – after Söder’s lost power struggle for the Union’s candidacy for chancellor – did the CSU strategists pull the ripcord. The party attempted a U-turn with a regular voter campaign, warned of the shift to the left in the federal government and thus courted the favor of the disappointed conservatives, warned of the “eco-dictat” and tax increases.
In the current election campaign, the CSU is once again presenting itself as decidedly conservative, categorically ruling out government cooperation with the Greens, and, as in 2018, it has rediscovered the migration issue that had been deliberately ignored in the meantime. While Söder’s predecessor Horst Seehofer had called for an upper limit for immigrants for years up until the 2018 election, Söder has been talking about a necessary “integration limit” again since this week.
The CSU’s course dilemma is reinforced by a lasting change in the Bavarian party landscape: The Free Voters, who were long referred to as the “flesh of the CSU”, have now established themselves noticeably to the right of the CSU. This became visible not least at the controversial Erdinger rally against the federal government’s heating law.
And Söder decided early on that he wanted to govern again with the Free Voters after the election. The mantra of Söder’s great role model Franz Josef Strauss, that there should be no democratically legitimate party to the right of the Union, was broken. In 2016, after the CDU’s election defeats, Söder himself loudly demanded that the CDU must take the “original mission of the conservatives” seriously again if it wanted to prevent permanent losses of voters.
Given the initial situation, the Bavarian election is not only a fateful election for the former shadow chancellor Söder. If the surveys are confirmed and the Free Voters return to the cabinet table with gains, the CSU would lose further ground. Söder’s name would then be permanently linked in the history books with the CSU’s loss of importance.