What is the point of the CDU?

Germany's centre-right party has strayed from its ideals

CDU/ Tim Hoffmann

Dear Reader,

I’ve written a few times in the past couple of weeks about the deception that the CDU carried out in pretending that they would finance the modernisation of the army and the country’s dilapidated infrastructure via welfare reform and spending cuts.

The lies that Friedrich Merz and his party told ahead of the election are so glaring that they are likely to further erode trust in the traditional political class. In a poll released on Tuesday, the same day that the debt package passed through the Bundestag, the AfD crept within four points of the CDU, on 23 percent to the centre-right party’s 27 percent.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Green party leader Britta Haßelmann observed that the CDU had wasted 18 months by rejecting a reform of the debt brake rules when they were in the opposition. “We all knew that the country badly needed investment, but you were too busy defaming me and my colleagues,” she told Merz in the Bundestag.

She has a point. Germany hasn’t had a f…