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The three CDU presidential candidates agreed to resolve the party leadership issue at a party conference in mid-January. This was announced by Secretary General Paul Ziemiak Saturday night on Twitter. Friedrich Merz’s team confirmed the agreement to SPIEGEL.
“The candidates prefer a party conference with a central presence,” Ziemiak wrote. “If that and a party conference with a decentralized presence were not possible, they advocate an online party conference with digital election of the federal executive committee.”
Therefore, Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz, and Norbert Röttgen have agreed to request the federal executive board to move the event to the new date. Previously, there had been consultations between the candidates and the current party president, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
According to information from SPIEGEL, the surprising turnaround is the result of several confidential consultations between the three CDU candidates in recent days. On Friday and Saturday, Merz, Laschet and Röttgen joined forces in video conferences and conference calls to find a solution. In the end, the Secretary General got involved to finalize the decision, and in the evening he made it public.
“I am very happy that the candidates send this strong sign of unity,” Ziemiak wrote. Merz also announced via Twitter that he appreciated the deal. “It is a good compromise that we agreed today.”
In the Union, the commitment is greeted with relief, but also with amazement. The question is why the party leadership was unable to find this solution last weekend, but instead staged a drama to end on a date that was only a few weeks after the originally planned date of December 4.
“But we need clarity for the new year. This is what our joint proposal is for,” wrote Laschet, Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. Norbert Röttgen was also satisfied, also on Twitter: “We need to clarify our leadership issue quickly so that we can focus on the upcoming election campaigns with renewed force.”
The debate within the CDU leadership on alternatives to the party’s congress on December 4, which had become questionable due to the crown pandemic, had recently intensified. After five hours of talks, the party’s presidential hopefuls initially only agreed that the appointment would not take place in December. In particular, Laschet and Merz clashed. (Read a reconstruction of the events here).
The pressure in the match became too great
Despite the agreement that has now been reached, the Causa Party Congress leaves a lot of broken glass. The candidates are clouded, the party leadership seems disoriented. The fact that the weekend’s decision lasted only a few days was probably due to the fact that in the end much of the party found the situation untenable.
The pressure grew day by day to at least come up with some kind of plan with which to go into the next few weeks and into the next super election year. Several state associations had worked on proposals to set a party congress for January. There were also calls for a membership vote. Apparently the party leadership was willing not to deviate too much, but to come up with an idea themselves.
Schäuble has the digital vote legally verified
Now the CDU is most likely holding a digital party conference. A face-to-face party convention in mid-January should be as bypassed as in early December. The difficulty lies in the fact that the parties can meet digitally, but cannot elect their board of directors online. The CDU now wants to work quickly with the other parliamentary groups on a legally secure solution.
More recently, the President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), initiated a legal examination to determine whether a digital person-to-person vote might even be possible in the existing legal situation, or what changes to party law would be necessary and implementable. on short notice. In case of a necessary short-term change in the law, the SPD parliamentary group recently signaled openness. The result of the legal examination is apparently not yet available.
