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In the summer of 2018, the sister parties CDU and CSU argued for weeks about how Germany should deal with asylum seekers in the future. At that time, the grand coalition threatened to break up due to the dispute. Meanwhile, the head of the CSU, Markus Söder, looks critically at the events of two years ago and laments his own behavior towards Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in the dispute over German asylum policy.
“We all contributed to aggravating the dispute, including me. But I also corrected myself,” said the Bavarian prime minister in an interview with the authors of his new biography “Markus Söder, the shadow chancellor.” The book, not commissioned by Söder, will be published by Droemer Verlag on October 1 and was written by the two journalists Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.
The bitter discussion with Merkel “gave the impression that we were more on the ‘dark side of power,'” Söder said. “That just didn’t feel right.” It was a mistake to believe that AfD voters could be brought back: “That was a wrong strategy. It was a mistake not to attack the AfD first.”
The head of government confessed that he perceived the electoral campaign before the state elections in Bavaria in 2018 as a “near-death political experience”. “The probability that I could become the prime minister with the shortest term was not small.” After his first election to the office in March 2018, he also made mistakes.
Specifically, Söder regretted the controversial decree of April 2018: “I would do some things differently today, especially in terms of form.” At that time, the Bavarian cabinet decided on the initiative of Söder that in the future a crucifix should hang in the entrance area of each state authority. Söder now emphasized that Bavaria was a “liberal-conservative” country. “The CSU should not focus on the conservatives.”
For his longtime rival for power in the CSU, Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, Söder found conciliatory words in the book: “I learned more from Horst Seehofer than I wanted to admit for a long time. We are probably more connected in a way that the two of us. believed. “
