The CDU held its federal party conference in Berlin this week. Not much spectacular happened. So afterwards you had to somehow sell the unspectacular as exciting and disruptive. The fact that Friedrich Merz made so few mistakes in office that he was actually re-elected – the first party leader since Angela Merkel.
The largely harmonious joint performance of Merz, CSU leader Markus Söder and Ursula von der Leyen; in which the contradiction was generously overlooked by the fact that the President of the Commission swore all the anti-AfD oaths of Germany, but at the same time, as the CDU’s leading candidate for the EU elections, cooperated with other European right-wing parties didn’t want to rule out. -wing parts. The “signal of unity” that emerged from this three-person unity concluded with the fact that we managed to avoid an open dispute at the party conference on the question of the candidate for chancellor for the next federal elections.
Even Merkel didn’t show up
All this was intended to indicate that the ‘conservative people’s party’ had finally found its way back to itself after the Merkel era. With traditional slogans such as ‘freedom’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘security’, the CDU now wants to ‘win the future together’. However, a clear break with the former chairman could not be achieved. In any case, not from the party opposite the former Chancellor. Merkel, on the other hand, simply ignored an invitation to the party conference in the capital. In order to show voters the return to the old values through a concrete political example, the CDU in Berlin has decided to gradually reintroduce military conscription.
Too little and too late. That is a fairly accurate summary of what emerged from the federal party conference of the Christian Democrats. Given the state our country now finds itself in in many areas, it will take much more than a revival of the CDU from the 1980s to even begin to smooth over what this party has largely done in its sixteen years. in the sand under Angela Merkel herself.
Mohammed more and more often
While the “Christian Democratic Union” is still peaceful, Islamization fortunately continues in large parts of Germany. As the German Language Association determined and announced this week, the name Mohammed was one of the most popular first names for newborn children in many regions in 2023. The name of the conqueror, revered as a prophet in Islam, was the most common boy’s name in several states. In Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein, Mohammed was at the top in his various spellings last year.
In Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia it was already enough for second place. Although the name was given much less frequently throughout Germany than last year, the rapid increase in the number of new Mohammeds in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the name was only in tenth place a year earlier, is extremely remarkable. But as they say in Cologne in North Rhine-Westphalia: Et kütt wie et kütt.
The Wahl-O-Mat is online
For anyone who, given the developments of recent years and the current circumstances in Germany and Europe, is not yet sure whether to vote for the CDU again or perhaps even for the Greens: the elections have opened this week – Mat about the upcoming EU elections online. The political question and answer game should be great fun for young and old again this year.
Sometimes you can even expect a big surprise at the end of the game. At least if you have the courage to include parties in your evaluation that you keep trying to convince yourself and the people around you that you have nothing to do with. How many people who still see themselves as “classical liberal” or “not right-wing, but conservative” will this time again avoid any shocking self-consciousness by leaving the “unelectable” AfD out of the evaluation from the start…?