Angela
Merkel’s divided Union veers toward fall
German
chancellor and Bavarian CSU leader Horst Seehofer are split over
migration and the rise of the far-right.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
6/7/16, 5:32 AM CET
BERLIN —
As she struggles to solve Europe’s refugee crisis, the greatest
challenge to Angela
Merkel’s
leadership comes not from an increasingly unhelpful Turkish president
but her notional ally in Bavaria.
While the chancellor
sparred with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over press freedom, anti-terror
legislation and visa liberalization — all aimed at securing the
controversial refugee swap between the EU and Turkey — her
Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the
Christian Social Union (CSU), are in the throes of their worst
internal crisis in over 40 years.
A decade-old rivalry
between Merkel and her Bavarian counterpart Horst Seehofer began to
heat up last September over the refugees, and there are deep divides
between their two conservatives parties on how to respond to a new
far-right challenge from the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
This all threatens
to come to a head at an extraordinary CDU/CSU summit at the end of
this month, to be held on neutral terrain at a convention center in
Potsdam. Talk of “the Union” — as their grouping in the
national parliament is known — breaking apart may be premature, but
the spat between Berlin and Munich is of real concern to party
elders.
“This is a first.
For the first time, the CSU questions the unity of the two parties,
blaming the CDU for a drift to the Left, towards the political
center,” Heiner Geissler, an 86-year-old CDU veteran, told public
broadcaster ARD on Saturday. “This has to stop.”
Franz Josef vs
Helmut
The symbiosis
between Merkel’s CDU, which exists in all 15 of Germany’s 16
states except Bavaria, and the CSU is unique in the country’s party
system: They can act as one group in the Bundestag (lower house of
parliament) because they don’t compete with each other in national
elections.
The history of the
Union, dating back to 1949, is full of episodes of rivalry and
attacks, with the Bavarian party often casting itself in the role of
champion of conservative values against the more heterogeneous
tendencies in the CDU.
They’ve always
made up afterwards, though not before some very brusque exchanges: In
1976, CSU leader Franz Josef Strauss called the CDU’s Helmut Kohl
“completely incapable” for failing to get elected chancellor. “He
lacks any preconditions when it comes to character, intellect and
politics — he lacks everything.” Kohl proved him wrong six years
later, becoming chancellor for the next 16 years, a record as yet
unmatched by Merkel.
“Everything they
[the CSU] do is meant to preserve their hegemony on power in Bavaria”
— Frank Decker, politics professor
Yet officials and
experts agree that the current conflict between Merkel and Seehofer
is unprecedented in its bitterness and duration.
It was sparked on
the night of Friday, September 4, 2015, when Merkel decided to grant
free passage to refugees stuck at a train station in the Hungarian
capital Budapest — against Seehofer’s will.
Merkel reportedly
tried to call Seehofer that night, but the Bavarian state premier did
not answer his phone; Seehofer says he had turned off his cell phone
that night, according to a report in Spiegel magazine.
Around a week later,
Seehofer said Merkel’s decision “was a mistake that will occupy
us for a long time.”
It was a
self-fulfilling prophecy: The German chancellor has since then been
under a torrent of attacks from the Bavarians. That same month,
Seehofer provoked Merkel by rolling out the red carpet for Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one of her most outspoken opponents.
Two months later, Seehofer lectured and humiliated her when she was a
guest at a CSU congress.
Early in 2016, he
first threatened to sue Merkel’s government at the Constitutional
Court, and then said her refugee policy had put Germany into a state
of “unlawful rule.”
Seehofer clearly has
an eye on the opinion polls: As hundreds of thousands of refugees
poured into Germany, the initial welcome turned critical and support
for the conservatives began to suffer. Since September, the CDU/CSU
bloc has fallen to about 33 percent support in the polls, down from
42 percent, while the anti-immigrant AfD has risen to 13 percent from
4 percent. According to a poll by Spiegel, a majority of Germans
believe Seehofer’s criticism of Merkel has boosted the AfD.
It’s not only the
AfD that has benefited: While the CDU is suffering in the polls,
Seehofer’s strategy seemed to have paid off for the CSU back home
in Bavaria, where support for the AfD is more modest at 8 percent and
the CSU gets 48 percent approval.
“Seehofer and the
CSU have one clear priority, which is Bavaria. This is the root cause
of this fight,” said Frank Decker, a politics professor at the
University of Bonn. “Everything they do is meant to preserve their
hegemony on power in Bavaria.”
‘Die Merkel’
The CSU chief knows
his attacks against Merkel resonate in the Bavarian capital, where
officials burst into tirades about die Merkel, and one complained
about being called by “every other CSU parish council chair in
Bavaria” to protest at her policies.
Seehofer’s
aggressive stance may also be an attempt to secure his own standing
in Munich, particularly — according to German media reports —
against attempts by the state’s ambitious finance minister,
49-year-old Markus Söder, to promote himself.
But the pushback
against Merkel in Bavaria is not just a reflection of grassroots
sentiment — it is also being encouraged by party elders such as
Edmund Stoiber, the CSU’s éminence grise. German media report that
it was the former Bavarian state premier and ex-party chief who
recommended that Seehofer extend the invitation to Orbán, and who
organized Stoiber and Seehofer’s trip to Moscow in February to meet
Russian President Vladimir Putin — another provocation aimed at
Merkel.
A conservative
hardliner with a legendary network of connections, Stoiber knows
Seehofer has scores to settle with Merkel. In 2004, Seehofer resigned
as deputy head of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag after Merkel —
then CDU party leader and opposition leader, still a year away from
becoming chancellor — pushed through a health policy compromise he
had vehemently opposed.
Merkel’s strategy
has so far been to ignore the Bavarian attacks, but nine months of
CSU salvoes are taking their toll and officials say the chancellor is
becoming increasingly angry, while the CDU is getting worried about
the harm to the party.
Backed by advisers
like Peter Altmaier, who runs her chancellery, Merkel seems to
believe the conservatives’ best tactic for dealing with the AfD is
not to copy their populist messages, but to modernize the CDU and
broaden its appeal. This has not just annoyed the Bavarians: One CDU
official in the Bundestag said the removal of members of the party’s
conservative wing from top positions since she became chancellor in
2005 has tilted the party too far to the Left.
Kohl’s lesson
While there have
been reports about CSU plans to break free from the CDU, campaign
behind its own candidate in the 2017 elections and — for the first
time — not join forces with the CDU in a single bloc afterwards,
experts like politics professor Decker are skeptical. Apart from
anything, CSU is well aware of the CDU’s superiority in numbers.
Currently, only 56 of the 310 CDU/CSU members of parliament come from
the CSU.
History would seem
to support that view.
When Kohl and
Strauss crossed swords back in 1976, the Bavarian leader pushed the
CSU to break with the CDU in the Bundestag, triggering one of the
worst crises in the history of the Union. Kohl counterattacked,
threatening to found a Bavarian branch of his Christian Democrats and
challenge the CSU’s conservative hegemony in the state.
The CSU blinked
first. Just three weeks later, Strauss withdrew his threat and the
two conservative forces in the Bundestag were reunited.
When Seehofer said
in a newspaper interview on Sunday that he would like to end the
dispute with Merkel, one CDU official — who did not want to be
identified — shrugged it off with the words: “Let’s see how
long it lasts this time.”
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