[ad_1]
Saturday 19 September 2020
The fight for the presidency of the CDU has not yet been decided. But one thing is clear about candidate Friedrich Merz: he is against the candidacy of a CSU politician for chancellor. Previous cases were “exceptional situations”, but currently do not exist.
The candidate for the presidency of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, has spoken out against a candidate of the CSU for Chancellor of the Union. In 1980 and 2002, the union with a CSU politician entered the federal elections because he wanted a majority in the CDU, Merz said in Hildesheim at a Junge Union Niedersachsen event.
But he described this as an exceptional situation because the CDU did not trust itself to be the candidate for chancellor at the time. “Frankly: I don’t see such a situation for 2020,” emphasized Merz, who ran in the election of the head of the CDU in early December against North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister Armin Laschet and foreign politician Norbert Röttgen.
Merz was applauded by the JU delegates for this comment. It remains that the new president of the CDU will agree with the head of the CSU who will run for the Union in the elections, Merz said. It has “great respect” for the CSU, and the combination of sister parties ensures that the Union has the opportunity to cover a very wide spectrum of voters. There are many voters in Lower Saxony who “reluctantly” voted for the CDU because there is the CSU in Bavaria. “But there are so many CSU voters in Bavaria that they vote reluctantly for the CSU because the CDU exists in the rest of the republic,” Merz added.
The Union must preserve this “treasure” of appearing together ”. The background for this is the debate over whether the head of the CSU, Markus Söder, could also be a Union candidate for chancellor because, in polls, he was ahead of all three candidates for the CDU presidency. More recently, he stressed several times that his place was in Bavaria, but there is still speculation that he could aspire to run for Chancellor of the Union.
