CDU leader Friedrich Merz replaces General Secretary Mario Czaja. The party announced on Tuesday. Carsten Linnemann is to be his successor. He has been deputy CDU chairman and head of the basic program commission. According to the party’s statement, Merz and Czaja “mutually agreed” to end their cooperation at the top of the party. “I didn’t take the decision lightly to propose a change in the position of Secretary General of the CDU,” Merz tweeted. He announced that he would work to ensure that Czaja can take on a prominent position in the field of health, care and social policy.
Czaja was elected Secretary General in January 2022 with a good 94 percent of the vote. In the party, however, there had been dissatisfaction with Czaja for a long time. Among other things, he was accused of organizational weaknesses. In addition, there were complaints that he was not sufficiently present in public for a general secretary.
Linnemann calls for a “welfare state brake”
The designated successor, Linnemann, has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009. Before he was elected Vice-CDU, he was head of the economic wing of his party. Linnemann is considered a politician who repeatedly urges citizens to take responsibility for themselves and warns that the state is taking on too many tasks. In the Corona crisis, many people got used to the state cushioning all problems, Linnemann believes. Instead, what is urgently needed is a “welfare state brake”. The state must save.
In contrast to Czaja, Linnemann is well connected in the party. He takes care of the new basic program with great passion. He is committed to broad and open debates. Czaja wished his designated successor “energy and bright ideas” for the fulfillment of his task. And his party, “that it is consistently pursuing the course it has taken of opening up and developing from a member party to a participatory party that campaigns for a new culture of belonging with measure and center in the breadth of society”.
The CDU leadership has recently come under pressure to justify itself because the party cannot benefit from the current problems of the traffic light coalition. The CDU and CSU are together at the top of the polls with almost 30 percent. So far, the Union, under the leadership of Merz, has not managed to clearly exceed 30 percent. Instead, the AfD in particular had increased recently.
“Carsten Linnemann is a real stroke of luck for the CDU,” said the parliamentary manager of the Union faction in the Bundestag, Thorsten Frei. With his political orientation, Linnemann embodies what the CDU needs now. The federal government is failing on economic policy issues. A creeping deindustrialization combined with fears of decline unsettle people. “That’s exactly where we have to set the traffic light, Carsten Linnemann is the right person for this,” said Frei.
Meanwhile, the CDU federal executive had to accept defeat in the first instance in the exclusion proceedings against the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen. A CDU district party court in Thuringia rejected Maassen’s party expulsion demanded by the federal leadership.