Since the election debacle in Saxony-Anhalt, CDU leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has come under massive pressure from within his own party. CSU leader Markus Söder has now rejected speculation that his party could seek to replace him as head of government. The CSU would “under no circumstances” seek to bring down the chancellor, Söder told Bild am Sonntag. Within the CDU, however, unrest continued over the weekend, while the SPD called on its coalition partner to keep its nerve.
Söder described the Saxony-Anhalt election as “the biggest protest vote election in German history”. “Of course, people are talking about parties and individuals,” he acknowledged. But the Union would be well advised to “stand together and not allow ourselves to be divided by the AfD”.
The Bavarian minister president also pointed out that the challenges would remain the same if the head of government were replaced. Asked whether he still considered Merz the right federal chancellor, Söder said: “Yes, he stands by the reforms.”
The CDU, which had previously governed Saxony-Anhalt, lost more than half of its vote in the election in the state a week ago. The AfD won with a record 43.8 percent. This could mean that, for the first time in German federal history, a party classified as partly right-wing extremist could form a state government.
Criticism of Merz within the CDU has not let up since the election defeat. Dennis Radtke, head of the CDU’s employee wing (CDA), said that the course of a “CDU pure” pursued by the chancellor had failed and called for “a change of course”. CDU campaigners in the elections taking place next Sunday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin distanced themselves from the CDU leader. Media speculation about a “change of chancellor” also flared up again.
Criticism of the chancellor’s course so far also came from Saxony over the weekend. According to Welt, the state’s district party leaders called for a “ruthless analysis” in a letter to Merz. Saxon CDU Bundestag member Florian Oest, one of the co-signatories, also called for the nationwide CDU conference of district party leaders, which is currently planned for the beginning of November, to be brought forward immediately.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, CDU campaigners are now even concerned about whether the party will return to the state parliament. “There is concern about failing to clear the five-percent threshold,” said Marc Reinhardt, deputy chairman of the CDU parliamentary group in the Schwerin state parliament, to Tagesspiegel on Saturday.
“Many people are dissatisfied, and the federal government is providing no tailwind,” he said. Daniel Peters, the CDU’s lead candidate in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, ruled out appearances with Merz during the election campaign. CDU Secretary-General Franziska Hoppermann defended Merz’s course. She said she naturally saw that the declining polling figures for the Christian Democrats raised questions. “But we are on the right path,” Hoppermann said on Deutschlandfunk.
Söder, however, called for greater speed in implementing the reforms. The federal government now needed to “step up its game significantly”, the CSU leader said. “The results so far are too meager.” The CSU chairman also criticized the SPD, “which finds it difficult to deal with reforms”. He accused the Social Democrats of sending “a bad signal” by “suddenly starting to question everything after this election result”.
The Social Democrats, for their part, expressed outrage over calls from within the Union for Labor Minister Bärbel Bas to resign. SPD Secretary-General Tim Klüssendorf described them as “a helpless diversionary maneuver”. The Union would be “well advised not to project the palpable dissatisfaction and the ongoing internal debates within its parliamentary group onto the coalition partner now”, he told Stern. SPD parliamentary managing director Dirk Wiese called on the CDU to “keep its nerve”.
Christian von Stetten (CDU), head of the Union parliamentary group for small and medium-sized businesses, had previously described Bas as “no longer tenable” in Bild. He accused her of blocking necessary reforms “for months”.
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