According to former CSU chairman Horst Seehofer, the union would have lost the federal election even with his party friend Markus Söder as candidate for chancellor. “I think the thesis that if Markus Söder had been a candidate for chancellor, everything would have gone better, is incomprehensible,” Seehofer told TV station Bild on Wednesday about his successor in the CSU chairmanship. The main cause of the election defeat was a neglect of social policy in the Union. “If we lose 1.4 million voters to the SPD – as I believe, for socio-political reasons: pension, rent, family – then we have not worked this field adequately.”
As a candidate for chancellor, Söder would have been “defoliated and examined” just like Armin Laschet (CDU) or Annalena Baerbock (Greens), said Seehofer, who is still in office as Federal Minister of the Interior. And: “We had a messed up election campaign together. You can’t deny that.” Söder, who was inferior to Laschet in the struggle for the candidacy for chancellor despite better poll numbers, had partly poked against him during the election campaign and said after the lost election: “In the end, the Germans wanted a different candidate for chancellor than the one that the CDU and CSU have put up.”