At the CDU party conference, the delegates are arguing about the women's quota, the obligatory year of society, they are fighting the traffic light but are also fighting to modernize themselves. At the end a beginning is made.
Modernize, refurbish, completely revamp - the terms that were circulating in public before the CDU party conference made it clear how urgently the delegates wanted to give their party a new image. The shock of the historic defeat in the 2021 federal election was deep. The Christian Democrats lost 12 percent of the voters' approval.
However - in order to renew one's own image, it is imperative to turn symbolic screws that are visible from afar. A signal of change is difficult to send out with any change of the third digit after the decimal point.
This realization led the party leader Friedrich Merz in the run-up to the party congress to support the application for the introduction of a women's quota. It was passed with a narrow majority on Friday evening - after a heated debate and a plea by the party leader, who asked the hall in the face of an impending defeat: "Don't we dare to take such a small leap forward today?" The CDU must do much more "than what we want to decide here today".
That was the case, along with the declaration by the former Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner that she was fed up with the biggest thigh slaps in the hall when women said they didn't want to be "quota women". "Our voters are positioned differently," Klöckner argued, "either suits us or we no longer suit them." The delegates finally decided with a clear majority to jump "forward" and thus sent two signals at the same time: Yes, the CDU wants to modernize and it can once again argue passionately about positions.
In turn, the delegates managed to do this much more passionately with such fundamental questions of self-image than with the main motion to combat the energy crisis. If the women's quota hadn't made it onto the agenda, Friday would have been a pale day.
In his hour-long speech at the beginning of the party congress, Merz vigorously lashed out at the traffic light government - too hesitant to support Ukraine with weapons, haphazard in trying to avert the looming energy crisis, powerless in defending Germany's raison d'etat against Israel. In addition to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck was the target of Merz' criticism.
Germany is not Bullerby. "We are the fourth largest industrial nation in the world that cannot afford to set up a trainee program for federal economics ministers." The lead motion, with which the CDU wants to put pressure on the traffic light coalition, contains concrete proposals with a 1,000-euro energy flat rate for poorer households and a price cap for the basic electricity and gas requirements, but it is not a comprehensive alternative to government policy .
What was more striking about Merz's speech than his demands was his willingness to admit the party's mistakes from the past 16 years of government participation. As justification for the CDU's yes to the 100 billion euro package of the traffic light for defense, Merz stated that his own party was also responsible for "that the Bundeswehr is not in the state in which it should be".
Merz also pointed out that the party was partly to blame for the development that had made Germany too dependent on Russian gas. "That was a mistake," he said, "a great political stupidity. We have to correct that, we were also involved in it."
How different did guest speaker Markus Söder sound at the same lectern 24 hours later. In the opinion of many Christian Democrats, the Munich taunts by the CSU leader before the federal election against the then chancellor candidate Armin Laschet made a decisive contribution to the fact that the Union achieved a historically poor result. Söder did not become specific, but noted at the beginning of his speech that 2021 was "not our best year". Mistakes were made, "of course also by me". The party congress approved the statement with applause, so the topic was ticked off for the CSU boss.
And otherwise, unlike Merz, Söder saw no reason for self-critical navel gazing, but served traditional conservative beliefs - from the right to your own car, to the fundamental rejection of drug approval to the statement that he only believed the Green Anton Hofreiter "that he was for the Bundeswehr is when he finally gets a proper military haircut".
Such polemics were well received by the delegates. After Söder's speech, Merz explained that they work and fight well together, in a friendly and trusting manner. However, the 1001 delegates then got back to critically examining their own positions.
The demand for equality between men and women in the Charter of Fundamental Values had already been defended against an amendment. Here the Junge Union and the Mittelstandsvereinigung suffered defeat in the vote. They wanted to remove the term equality from the program on the grounds that the term would aim at "equality" between women and men. As in the fight against women's quotas, both organizations suffered defeat.
As the last major debate at the party congress, the delegates argued that the CDU advocated a mandatory "society year". A part of the party, to which the Junge Union also belongs, wanted to keep the social commitment voluntary. The hope that the obligation for everyone to do social service could counteract the drifting apart of society was opposed to the argument that the self-image of the CDU spoke against an obligation by the state.
In the end, as with the women's quota, the party congress decided in favor of the braver path: the obligation for young people to do a community year after leaving school. The issues that had previously caused the CDU leadership the greatest concern ultimately became the strongest signal that emanated from the CDU party conference: in addition to the willingness to acknowledge one's own mistakes, one realization prevailed with great effort: renewal and Modernization will only be available if the party is willing to change itself.
