At the weekend there is a “big family reunion”, at least that’s how the Junge Union describes its Germany Day in Münster. The most important representatives of the somewhat older Union are also expected. The party leaders Armin Laschet and Markus Söder have announced themselves. Just like three gentlemen who can well imagine inheriting Laschet: Ralph Brinkhaus, Jens Spahn and Friedrich Merz. So it should be a first mood test in the race for the Laschet successor. But there is also a lot of family row in the house. Because the question of where the future of the Union lies touches on a generation conflict.
46 percent of the first-time voters voted for the FDP or the Greens in the federal election, but only ten percent voted for the Union parties. The CDU is currently grappling with a lot of painful findings – that is one of the worst. There are currently quite a few in the CDU who also blame the Junge Union for this. The JU is a youth organization that has lost touch with the youth, it says. Above all, it is a career network, its members live in a parallel world.
And the strange contradiction between size and result is actually astonishing at the JU. The Junge Union describes itself as the largest political youth organization in Europe. It has almost 100,000 members – significantly more than the entire FDP. Nevertheless, it does not seem to be particularly attractive to young voters.
That probably also has something to do with representatives like Philipp Amthor. Amthor is only 28 years old, but has already had his first affairs behind him. Nevertheless, he was re-elected to the JU board – as treasurer of all things. And in the federal election he was still the top candidate for the CDU in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The Christian Democrats then lost more than 15 percentage points in the country and thus fared much worse than in the federal government. Amthor has also lost its direct constituency, it even ended up only in third place. But none of that seems to make him think. He continues to advise his party almost every day.
Would you prefer a few more years of Volker Bouffier?
It is also up to people like him that not everyone in the CDU thinks of improvement immediately when they rejuvenate. Then Volker Bouffier and Wolfgang Schäuble would prefer a few more years, some will think.
Because there are many of the type of Amthor. For example, the Hamburg party leader Christoph Ploß. The man is 36 years old. With him as the top candidate, the CDU regional association had a catastrophic result. But Ploß is still touring the German television channels and calling for a more conservative and economically liberal CDU. It’s no wonder that Karl-Josef Laumann’s collar bursts. “CDU state chairmen like Christoph Ploß, who only get 15 percent in their own state, should refrain from giving advice on the direction of the CDU,” complains the head of the workers’ wing. The CDU wanted to be “a people’s party and not a business-liberal clientele association”.
Because of the collapse of the Union in the federal election, there are now only 15 members of the Bundestag who are members of the Junge Union. The Young Socialists make up 49, significantly more than before. What does Tilman Kuban, the chairman of the Junge Union, say about this shift in power – and about the criticism of the boys in the CDU?
Kuban believes that the poor performance among young voters cannot be blamed on the Junge Union alone. Because there are certainly several reasons. “Thematically, I have often heard questions about upload filters, climate protection, the legalization of cannabis or the corona measures that have restricted the freedoms of young people, where the CDU was often not well positioned,” says Kuban. “We mentioned that, but as a JU we might have had to be louder.” However, “the different profiles of the top candidates also played a role” for the poor result. Kuban means that Annalena Baerbock and Christian Lindner were more attractive to many young people than Armin Laschet.
Under his leadership, “a lot has changed in the JU,” says Kuban
In addition, “a lot has changed” under his leadership in the JU, says Kuban. The Junge Union had “proposed and enforced three women in the last elections for the CDU federal executive board, and we now have almost parity on our own executive board”.
And the greater participation of members, which everyone in the CDU is now talking about, has been “exemplified” in the Junge Union for a long time. Before the last election as CDU chairman, “all JU members had to vote online on the candidates in order to determine an opinion of the JU”. Because the members are “just a lot more self-confident than before and not only want to have a say, but also have a say”.
The JU had “never been so broadly positioned in the media as it is today. Faces of the Junge Union are “now as different people as Philipp Amthor and Wiebke Winter”. Winter, that’s one of the three JU women who are now on the CDU federal executive board. The 25-year-old is primarily committed to climate protection.
The other two women are Anna Kreye (27) and Laura Hopmann (31). Even together, the three JU women are still younger than the oldest board member, Otto Wulff from the Seniors Union.
Hopmann is also a member of the state parliament in Lower Saxony and a member of the CDU district executive in Hildesheim. General Secretary Paul Ziemiak has just announced that Laschet wants to “put an ear to the track” in the regional and district associations in the coming days. Hopmann sees herself on the federal executive board as a representative of those who have had their ears there for a long time – and often only understand the train station. Rejuvenation and renewal would not only demand the young in the party, but actually everyone at the grassroots, says Hopmann. “But then we have to dare to hold people responsible who just get a chance to prove themselves.”
Hopmann has no national political ambitions. But it is very important to her that her party transforms into a “modern organization”. The CDU is currently acting like a car manufacturer who took care too late to develop other drives beyond the diesel engine.
From Hopmann’s point of view, the renewal of the CDU is not only a question of the biological age of the party leadership, but also of the issues that affected first-time voters: media skills, education, the climate. But the programmatic course is of course related to people. “We will not get any further as the CDU if we only feed our top staff from people who are dealing with issues such as economic or financial policy,” says Hopmann.
“We definitely have to dare to make the generation change,” says Hopmann. “I don’t know whether that will work with someone who was parliamentary group chairman 20 years ago.” Friedrich Merz can feel addressed here. With Hopmann, however, one can also hear well-measured criticism of Laschet’s will to persevere and Söder’s self-importance.
Ultimately, Laura Hopmann is not about an attack on individual party groups, but rather about a cultural change in the entire Union. “In the party, there is no longer any desire for many to suffer from the sensitivities of a few,” she says. Each individual member must be taken just as important with their vote as the professional politicians, which has not been sufficiently the case with the CDU and CSU in recent years. “This old idea of rigid hierarchies will no longer work if we want to survive as a party.”