Reorganization of the CDU top: Schäuble against member survey

CDU boss Laschet is still in office and hopes for government participation at the last minute. But his party is already discussing the choice of a successor. Wolfgang Schäuble has now also joined the debate.

A member survey on the way to a possible new CDU federal chairman considers Wolfgang Schäuble to be the wrong approach. “The CDU Germany has no better organ to consider the basis than the party congress,” said the President of the Bundestag at a literature festival in Hamburg. At previous party conventions, delegates voted on the new head of the Christian Democrats. Schäuble warned that a vote among members could be influenced, for example, by opinion polls.

The Union had crashed to 24.1 percent in the federal election, while the SPD was the strongest force with 25.7 percent. The SPD, the Greens and the FDP are currently negotiating a possible government coalition. CDU boss Laschet therefore announced on Thursday that he would propose to the party committees that a party congress be convened this Monday. In addition, he wants to moderate a process of transition in which party leaders, presidium and federal board are to be renewed.

Resistance to Laschet’s proposal

However, there is resistance to the action announced by Laschet because many party members – among them potential candidates for the office of CDU chief – prefer a member survey. For such a membership decision, the statutes of the party would have to be changed.

Both the Lower Saxony CDU state chief Bernd Althusmann and the Thuringian CDU parliamentary group leader Mario Voigt proposed the three prime ministers Daniel Günther (Schleswig-Holstein), Tobias Hans (Saarland) and Michael Kretschmer (Saxony) as candidates for the top office of their party. Voigt called in one ARDInterview with Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn as a possible CDU boss.

“Participation of the grassroots is very important”

Support for the participation of party members came from the sister party CSU. “I find the participation of the grassroots very important in such a situation,” said Thomas Kreuzer, CSU parliamentary group leader in the Bavarian state parliament, before the parliamentary group chairman conference of the Union in Magdeburg. There the leaders of the CDU and CSU wanted to analyze the result of the federal election.

Ultimately, it does not matter whether the CDU is reorganized into a member survey or whether regional conferences are held, said Kreuzer. A “firm and clear” list is necessary in order to be able to act if the negotiations between the SPD, Greens and FDP for a new federal government should fail. When asked whether the reorganization with CDU party leader Laschet could succeed, Kreuzer said: “I understood him to mean that he does not stand in the way of a new beginning and that he will probably also clear the way. I am convinced that they will CDU will find a good solution. “

Siegfried Borgwardt, CDU parliamentary group leader in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, called for the district chairperson’s conference to be more closely involved in personnel issues. “We have not made this proposal for the first time, but it has not yet been taken up,” said Borgwardt.

Demand for resignation of the CDU presidium

Meanwhile, voices in the CDU are loud that the entire party presidium should resign as a consequence of the election slump. The parliamentary managing director of the CDU state parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt, Markus Kurz, said: “It would be logical if you make a general fresh start. The time is ripe for it.” Kurz said there was nothing against “one or the other” running for the presidium again. “But if you step back completely and say that we have experienced a fiasco, that would certainly be a clean cut that would also go down well with the citizens.”

Christian von Stetten, member of the Bundestag, had already suggested that the CDU presidium resign. He told “Bild am Sonntag” that the presidium could enforce a candidate for chancellor “against all polls, against the sister party, against the parliamentary group and against the party base” – if the latter does not win the elections, it has “not just the candidate for chancellor, but that entire party presidium poses an acceptance problem and has to make its offices available “.