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Sunday, January 03, 2021
“Impulse 2021”
Laschet and Spahn present their program
Armin Laschet and Jens Spahn present a ten point work to determine the CDU positions for the time after Angela Merkel. Even without an express reference to the race for the CDU presidency, the document clearly presents itself as a government program.
Together with the Federal Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, calls on the CDU to “make the 1920s a decade of modernization for Germany.” In an email to the district presidents of the CDU, members of the state and the Bundestag, as well as members of the European Parliament of the CDU, Laschet and Spahn sent a push paper that ntv.de has exclusively.
CDU Vice Laschet is a candidate for the party leadership. Spahn supports this candidacy and joins the team with Laschet as vice president of the party.
Neither in the mail nor in the joint program, which is overwritten with the hashtag # impulse2021, are these candidates mentioned. However, Laschet and Spahn present themselves there as initiators of an exit towards “a modern and traditional, cosmopolitan and patriotic Germany”. Laschet and Spahn only differ indirectly from the leadership style of former CDU president Angela Merkel, and without mentioning the chancellor: “The party and its program must determine the government’s action, and not the other way around,” they write in the mail.
In their push article, Laschet and Spahn note that the corona pandemic is accelerating global change “for better and for worse.” “We want to mold, not suffer.”
The document contains ten points, including the call for a “digital ministry worthy of its name” with the goal of having the “most modern digital infrastructure” by 2030. Laschet and Spahn also want to further promote startups, for example to through new state incentives for venture capital. They promise the economy as a whole a “burden moratorium.” Structurally weak regions should be supported with low tax rates and simplified approval procedures. In general, bureaucratic obstacles will be removed. A separate point is the advancement of the ecological-social market economy. Among other things, Laschet and Spahn want to campaign for an expansion of the hydrogen infrastructure.
The push document also names “national digital schools analogous to music schools” as well as an “extension of compulsory schooling for young people aged 16 to 18 without a certificate of completion of studies.” On internal security, Laschet and Spahn demand “zero tolerance for crime.” At the European level, they want to lay the groundwork for a digital tax and increase the EU’s ability to compensate through more majority decisions in the Council and “different speeds”. As a lesson from the corona pandemic, they propose expanding the capacities of health authorities and central offices in companies and the administration. In the future, important medicines and protective materials will be manufactured in Europe.
To “create” social cohesion, Laschet and Spahn want to advocate “the recognition and strengthening of diversity on the basis of common values.” At this point, he calls both for well-integrated immigrants to remain in the country and for those who are forced to leave and those at risk to be returned to the country. They promise the CDU, among other things, a strengthening of member participation, open debates and a “clear demarcation to the right.”
Most of the 1001 delegates who will decide on the new CDU president at a digital party congress on January 16, will come from among the recipients to whom the impulse document was sent. In addition to Laschet, the former leader of the parliamentary group of the Union Friedrich Merz and the external expert of the CDU Norbert Röttgen are running.
