About the question of whether Germany should become more conservative.
About possible Union chancellor candidates and coalition partners, Muslims in Germany – and about sausage as the crown of German dominant culture.
At the beginning there is an interview with the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), which moderator Louis Klamroth recorded a week earlier. The documentary “The Merz Strategy – where is the CDU heading?”, which was shown on television before the talk show was broadcast, serves as the basis for the discussion. In it, CDU party leader Friedrich Merz states that he is ruling out a power struggle over the candidacy for chancellor. Söder apparently agrees with this in the interview – and then immediately taunts his rival Armin Laschet. In 2021, one person’s ambition failed, says Söder, and: “It wasn’t me.” Then the CSU politician expresses sunshine with the CDU boss and cites the common goal of “change of government”. “There hasn’t been this much unity with the CDU for 10 or 15 years.”
Of course, Klamroth is making the Union’s candidacy for chancellor an issue. “It has to be one of us,” says Söder, referring to Merz. When asked whether Hendrik Wüst, in his opinion, had fallen out of the running for chancellor, Söder did not answer. In his opinion, this question will not arise any time soon anyway. “I don’t think the traffic light will break,” says the CSU leader and at the same time calls the remaining time in government until the election “a lost year.”
In other questions, too, Söder prefers taunts and emotions to factual arguments. For example, he presents the Free Voters as practical because the CSU then “doesn’t have to form a coalition with the Greens or other parties”. With regard to the AfD, Söder states that the appearance of the Sahra Wagenknecht alliance (BSW) would change “the more destructive voter potential”. And about the TV duel with Mario Voigt (CDU) and Björn Höcke (AfD), Söder says: “I found Höcke really weak. A male trying to argue his point.”
In contrast, Söder is avoiding an answer to the question of whether the CDU should secure the state leadership with the AfD’s votes or whether a coalition with BSW would be conceivable. Ultimately, he shifts the responsibility onto others: “Ultimately the CDU and the CDU state leadership have to decide on site.”
When it comes to Islam, Söder seems to follow the tactic of self-contradiction. One person represents two completely incompatible positions in order to please different target groups. According to experts, this tactic works because listeners often dismiss what they disagree with as “not serious.” In response to Klamroth’s question, Söder first says: “I believe that Muslims and their faith are part of German society, that is very clear.” Immediately afterwards he says that Islam is not part of it in Germany. Söder explains this using the example of white sausages in Bavaria, which, in his opinion, “have always been an integral part of the cultural inventory,” in contrast to Islam. Finally, the CSU politician praises the “Bavarian Dream of Life” and adds: “If you don’t want it, you can live somewhere else. And we are very consistent with that.”
The chairman of the SPD youth organization Jusos, Philipp Türmer, enters into the Union’s candidate for chancellor question by saying that he currently sees Merz in pole position. “If I were a CDU member, it would worry me a bit that, even though he is already 68 years old, he has just as much government experience as I do, for example, none at all.” Türmer briefly switches to substantive arguments: Merz stands for a backward-looking conservatism with a radical market course and combine interest politics for the richest with a right-wing culture war. Immediately afterwards comes the next full-bodied statement from Thürmer: “I am convinced that if Friedrich Merz becomes the Union’s candidate for chancellor, then even Angela Merkel will vote for the SPD.”
When asked about a possible coalition with the CDU, Sahra Wagenknecht, chairwoman of the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, reacted with criticism of the currently governing coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP. And: “Mr. Merz is the incarnation of the fact that things can be even worse than the traffic lights.” The AfD benefits from this. In order to explain the label “left-conservative” that Wagenknecht gave to her newly founded party, Wagenknecht uses an excursus on the history of the term, which leads to renewed criticism of the CDU and the lack of a “motor for advancement” in Germany: Those who work hard, I hardly have any chance of becoming prosperous.
The Thuringian CDU state chairman Mario Voigt, on the other hand, says: “The CDU is back” and presents the basic program that his party has been working on since 2022 as a sign of a new direction. Moderator Klamroth then shows a short video showing how to deal with it Islam in the draft of this basic program – and the debate about the sentence “Muslims who share our values belong to Germany” and its reformulation.
“It reminds me of yesterday’s debates that we have had for 20 years,” says journalist Khola Maryam Hübsch and asks the question: “Aren’t we already further along as a society?” The CDU was already further along, as if you look at them The basic program from 2007 shows, says Hübsch. This was anchored in a common fight with Muslims against extremism. “It had something unifying.” Hübsch, however, interprets the statements in the current drafts as “fishing on the right edge”. She criticizes the fact that the CDU does not oppose the AfD in terms of content, but instead takes up its language. “If this is supposed to be the CDU’s new, innovative idea, to remove old terms from mothballs, then I don’t think it can become a people’s party because that is exclusionary,” says the journalist. In her opinion, the CDU is failing to strengthen the forces within Islam that are committed to tolerance and peace.
Voigt says that the CDU makes such topics its topics because the population is interested in them, and cites as an example a demonstration with around 1,000 people in Hamburg, at which posters with slogans such as “Caliphate is the solution” could be seen. The journalist Hübsch then insists on classification and differentiation: of the six percent Muslims in Germany, 0.5 percent are known as “threats”. In addition, terms such as “caliphate” and “Sharia” became political fighting terms that initially referred to norms in the Islamic world. And: “Shariah says: Muslims must abide by the laws of the country in which they live.” Only extremists would present this differently.
But extremists are said to have organized that demonstration in Hamburg, adds moderator Klamroth. According to journalist Robin Alexander, a “claim to dominance” was evident. “It’s like Pegida in Dresden, only in Islamic language.” Hübsch also sees a parallel between right-wing populism and the demands of religious extremists. The artist Enissa Amani insists on a classification: “The very, very large masses in Germany want to sharply distance themselves from it.”
Meanwhile, Alexander dissects Wagenknecht’s outrage at the results of a survey of 300 young people, 200 of whom are said to have said that the Koran is closer to them than the laws. “I also know Catholics who would have a problem with that,” says the journalist. “Our Bible also says that one should obey God rather than people. That’s thin ice.” Then Alexander asks why the CDU of all people is working on this topic. However, he accuses the traffic light of not having a plan.
The CDU politician Voigt is supposed to explain the term “leading culture”. He speaks of values and principles and describes guiding culture as “something inviting, but also something demanding”. He criticizes in a similarly vague way that certain topics have not been discussed for too long – and Amani chimes in: “For example, right-wing extremism?” She cites statistics from 2022 and 2023, according to which “a right-wing crime was committed every 28 minutes.” If such numbers also applied to the extremists at the Hamburg demo, people would also demand that something happen – rightly so, says the artist and activist.
Amani uses an example to question the impartiality in the dominant culture debate: “No one is bothered by the fact that the kids can no longer say “Forgive me”, they say “Sorry”. But the moment they use a Turkish or Arabic word, it means: our culture is at risk.”
The journalist Alexander gets the job of classifying the term. “Leading culture was the antithesis of the parallel society,” he says about the early days of the debate around twenty years ago, when “leading culture” was, however, European and not German. Alexander sees Leitkultur as “a kind of house rules of society that is more than what is written in the laws”. That’s why he rejects the idea that this is an “AfD-like” idea.
Voigt thinks it’s “not too much to ask” to know a poem or the lyrics to the national anthem. But that seems to be too general for Klamroth: he stumbles over the requirement from the CDU program to be familiar with customs. Voigt then thinks of the Thuringian bratwurst – just like Söder’s white sausage. He describes a Turk who invented a kebab for baking as “lived integration in Thuringia”: “This is a custom that is expanding,” says the CDU politician.
Wagenknecht turns the dominant culture question into a divisive tablet: In her opinion, people who ride bicycles, live in big cities and eat a climate-friendly diet look down on people with a different way of life. Klamroth doesn’t understand what this has to do with dominant culture, and Wagenknecht doesn’t have an enlightening answer. Instead, she criticizes commercialization.
Hübsch still manages to find a common denominator that can be derived from Wagenknecht’s statements: “You have to convince people of a guiding culture, you can’t prescribe it to anyone.” To do this, it has to be credibly demonstrated. This is different than the Basic Law, because this is not an order of thought, but a legal order.
Finally, the question is whether the CDU will stick to its rejection of cooperation with the AfD. “There will be no cooperation with the AfD,” says Thuringian CDU leader Voigt. The SPD politician Thürmer then pulls a list out of his pocket containing examples of where the CDU has cooperated with the AfD in the state parliament. In response, Voigt accuses the SPD of having worked with the AfD at the local level in Thuringia. As expected, a verbal skirmish ensues.
Wagenknecht, however, refuses to answer the question of whether her party would elect Voigt as Prime Minister in order to prevent the right-wing extremist AfD politician Höcke. Finally, she suggests programmatic conditions and says: “We will not be a majority procurer for Mr. Voigt at any price.” Conversely, Voigt says nothing about the possibility of entering into a coalition with BSW. His reasoning: There is still no BSW party program in Thuringia.