Status: October 12, 2021 5:37 p.m.
From President of the Bundestag to simple MP: Wolfgang Schäuble has announced that he will no longer play a leading role in the CDU in the future. In contrast to Altmaier and Kramp-Karrenbauer, he wants to keep his mandate.
Wolfgang Schäuble has been a member of the Bundestag for 49 years. He was parliamentary group chairman, minister, parliamentary manager, most recently President of the Bundestag – and a successful puller. This should be over now. With the reorganization of the CDU, Schäuble no longer wants to play a leading role in his party.
“He is not available for a candidacy for the federal executive committee of his party,” said a spokesman for Schäuble in the newspapers of the Funke media group. However, Schäuble was directly elected in his constituency. Therefore, the 79-year-old intends to exercise his mandate as a member of parliament “for the full electoral term”. He is taking a different path than Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Economics Minister Peter Altmaier. These had given up their mandates for the new Bundestag and thus cleared the way for the next generation.
As President of the Bundestag, Schäuble has so far been a member of the CDU Presidium by virtue of office. In the new electoral term, however, the SPD, as the strongest force in the Bundestag, is entitled to the position of President of Parliament.
Bouffier and Strobl keep their candidacy open
The CDU leadership decided yesterday to decide on the successor to party leader Armin Laschet by the beginning of 2022. Schäuble had supported Laschet as a candidate for chancellor. As a consequence of the worst result in a Bundestag election, a special party congress should also re-elect the entire leadership of the CDU from the Presidium and the Federal Executive Committee. Most recently, Schäuble had spoken out against a member survey on the way to a possible new CDU federal chairman – and thus also opposed the Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer.
According to the Funke newspapers, the deputy CDU federal chairmen Volker Bouffier and Thomas Strobl left it open whether they would run for office again. “That will be decided by the state chairman in due course,” said a party spokesman for the CDU Hessen with a view to Bouffier.
A spokeswoman for the CDU Baden-Württemberg said, according to the information about Strobl’s future in the federal party: “First the state, then the party, then the person – we will answer personnel questions in due course.”