EIt was 7:28 p.m. on Wednesday evening when Friedrich Merz said the M-word. It will be the only time this evening in the Congress Center in Hanover that the CDU chairman will utter the name of the former Chancellor. It will be the only time that her name will be audibly mentioned in the two and a half hours in which the CDU leadership in the Lower Saxony state capital will discuss the party's new basic program with their guests. This should be passed at the party conference in early May.
Merz embeds the name of his – at least former – political enemy well, he only mentions it in passing. At least no one can say they didn't say it. The rhetorical construction he chooses is not unusual. Merz recalls the speech by the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday after the start of the Russian war against Ukraine. In order to increase the height of the fall for the man whose office Merz has his sights set on, he lifts Scholz onto a pedestal. On February 27, 2022, the Chancellor made “an incredibly moving, good, internationally recognized government statement.” A government statement from the “Chancellor of the third largest economy in the world and the largest country in the European Union”. So that should be enough as a base.
Merz jumps forward two years, to the now. He recalls the meeting between Scholz and numerous other heads of state and government with the French President in Paris recently, at which there was a dispute over Macron's proposal to deploy ground troops in Ukraine. The CDU leader criticizes the lack of solidarity between Berlin and Paris. “The newspapers are full of descriptions of a complete rift between Germany and France.” He describes a chancellor who “sits and is silent” and returns home and explains in an interview what he really means by “those Taurus rockets.”
Then the time has come. “Can you imagine that a Konrad Adenauer, a Helmut Kohl, an Angela Merkel, yes, can you imagine that even a Helmut Schmidt, a Willy Brandt, even Gerhard Schröder…” the sentence remains unfinished. “Everyone would have done it differently.” It’s done. Merz said Merkel.
The odd blank space
What is even more remarkable than the chairman's reticence is that all of his colleagues on stage, but also all of the members gathered for this warming up of the CDU, treat Merkel and the 16 years of chancellorship that she gave to her party friends who are so eager to govern, like the proverbial elephant in the room. If Merz admits that she handled France better than Scholz, the discussion participants and questioners largely left out the years 2005 to 2016. As if they didn't really know how to deal with the fact that, on the one hand, there were years of power with many international crises overcome, but on the other hand, over the past two years, it has become clear what has fallen by the wayside: the Bundeswehr, the energy transition, the infrastructure, etc just to name a few points. Schleswig-Holstein's Education Minister Karin Prien simply mentioned, without going into more detail, that there “perhaps” was “one or two blank spaces”.
In connection with the basic program and the path towards it, Merz speaks of a “piece of self-assurance, reappraisal and criticism”. He, who likes to demand clarity, does not address what the CDU failed to do in the first two decades of the century in terms of strengthening military capabilities, independence from Russian raw materials in particular or from Chinese high-tech products.
Only at the very end does a pastor from the audience address his party friends and Merz about what many in the CDU see as the deficit of the Merkel years. However, the Chancellor's name is not mentioned at this point in the event. Asymmetric demobilization has been tried for a long time, he points out the strategy used by Merkel to lull the political rival's supporters to sleep by avoiding controversy so that they do not vote, which increases their own chances of victory. It's the right thing to balance, says the priest, who also warns that once trust is lost, it is difficult to regain. But when moderating, it is often the case that the “biggest screamer” sets the tone. He leaves it open whether he means the AfD. He wants to know from Merz how he plans to regain the trust of voters so that they are convinced that the basic program will really become new politics.
An end to the opponent's chloroforming
Merz picks up the ball. Even up until then, he had not spared the traffic light coalition and Chancellor Scholz, emphasizing that the Union was ready to go into the election campaign and then govern the country. To do this, you have to say specifically what you want to do when you govern again. “I strongly advocate that we seek political debate with the government and the parties supporting it and not avoid it,” as was done with asymmetrical demobilization. Remembering the former CDU General Secretary Heiner Geißler, Merz laughed and said that he had spoken of “chloroforming the political opponent”.
He thinks “relatively little” of it, Merz continues, because “at the end of the day it damages democracy” if one avoids the political debate “in the middle of our country”. Differences must be made clear. He makes the difference between the Merkel method and the Merz method clear, not excessively, but sufficiently clear, even without mentioning the Chancellor's name again. His audience seems to get it. The applause for Merz is great.
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