CSU leader Markus Söder is calling for early elections to the Bundestag. He suggests June 9, 2024 as the date – the European elections are scheduled to take place on that day. The Bundestag will not normally be re-elected until autumn 2025.
Söder said on Monday that he does not believe that the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) still has the strength to solve the country’s current problems, referring to the budget crisis and the dispute in the traffic light coalition. The centrifugal forces in the three-party alliance are great, the “inner substance” is dwindling, so “an early election would be the right way.” The traffic light government should now ask the question of trust, “not in parliament, but in front of the German people.”
Just a month ago he had another suggestion
With his advance, Söder changes his course. Just a month ago he called for the formation of a “government of national reason.” At that time he wanted the Chancellor to throw the FDP and the Greens out of the government and instead bring the Union into his cabinet as a junior partner. With this, the CSU boss caused discontent in the CDU. Why should the Union enter into an alliance with the SPD as a junior partner, even though it is twice as strong as the Social Democrats in the polls, was the question asked at the time by the CDU leadership.
The CDU was extremely angry about Söder’s unspoken proposal – also because General Secretary Carsten Linnemann had publicly set his party’s course a few days earlier. “If this federal government doesn’t pull itself together and break up, there will be no alternative to new elections,” Linnemann said at the time. Now Söder has switched to this CDU course. He justifies this by saying that the situation has become significantly worse after the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling on state finances. This “slap” for the traffic light coalition has put the government “in an absolute emergency” and Germany is now in a “national crisis”.
Parliament cannot be dissolved that easily
However, the path to a new election is not as easy as Söder gives the impression. Even if the Chancellor were to seek one – and there is not the slightest sign of that – he would not be able to force such an election on his own. The opposition certainly cannot do that. If the traffic light coalition fails, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier would probably demand that other possible alliances be explored before he allows a new election. The Union could then find itself forced to first talk about a red-black or a Jamaica coalition.
On Monday, Söder not only called for an early federal election, he also called for a coalition to be formed between the Union and the SPD after this election. Black-green is “not a real future model for big problems,” said the CSU leader. It is “a good model for good times, but simply not for difficult times.”
In the internal Union debate about how to deal with the debt brake, Söder clearly supported Friedrich Merz’s course. The CDU chairman vehemently defends the brakes. With it, the Basic Law protects “the state finances from the too bold access of those in power, it also protects the budget legislature from itself, and it protects the scope in public budgets for future generations,” says Merz. This could also be called “sustainability” in public finances, “a term that the SPD and the Greens like to use in every environmental policy debate, but never in budget deliberations.”
Last week, however, three CDU prime ministers appeared open to changes to the debt brake. Kai Wegner, the Governing Mayor of Berlin, was the most explicit. The debt brake was a good idea “in the sense of sound finances”. Wegner written on platform X. However, he considers its current design to be “dangerous”. It is to be feared that “the debt brake will increasingly become a brake on the future”. The Prime Ministers Reiner Haseloff (Saxony-Anhalt) and Michael Kretschmer (Saxony) had also signaled a willingness to change. And in Schleswig-Holstein, Daniel Günther’s government has already had to declare a budget emergency.
Söder said that he understood the budget problems that some people had. And they are “always ready to help Germany.” But the help does not lie in abolishing the debt brake, weakening it or “re-decorating it”. He rejects that, said Söder. And “the leaders of the CDU and CSU agree on this.” He therefore wants to send a very clear message to everyone “who is now discussing in the Union”: abolishing, softening, modeling or reorienting the debt brake “is the wrong way”.