How I tried to keep up with the CDU this year

Behind the story - How I tried to keep up with the CDU this year

Making-of is the name of our new format. We want to give you a personal look behind the scenes, tell you about our everyday journalistic work and our research. We are starting with a short series in which we look back on our moments in 2023.

The CDU has accompanied me through my childhood. To this day, my family still tells the story of how I told the principal at elementary school about Chancellor Helmut Kohl shortly before I started school. And about his party, the CDU. In some drawer at my parents' house there are also photos of me riding a merry-go-round with Norbert Blüm. I had a wonderful childhood.

In 2023, the CDU has accompanied me through life again. My bosses have decided that I'm not busy enough reporting on the FDP. And because they assume that I have a certain interest in everything bourgeois, they gave me the CDU. Reporting on Friedrich Merz as a child of the nineties? Fits, I thought. After all, he was already on my radar when he first became leader of the opposition.

Now, people like to accuse middle-class people in general and middle-class parties in particular of a certain sluggishness. If this is true of the comeback-hungry CDU under Merz and his Secretary General Carsten Linnemann, it must have passed me by. I experienced them quite differently.

The CDU and the Rolf Topperwien questions

I was in Israel with Merz, went hiking with Hendrik Wüst and followed Linnemann across Germany. Throughout the year, I was constantly trying to keep up with the pace set by the CDU and its leaders. And every time I thought: phew, now I've got them, Merz gave the next interview - and the game started all over again.

Yes, you read that right, games. Unfortunately, political journalism sometimes works like sports reporting. Posture grades are distributed according to similarly nebulous criteria as an appointment to the "eleven of the day" at kicker. You can try to free yourself from this. Just like you can try to lose a few kilos after Christmas. It usually doesn't work.

So you ask yourself Rolf-Töpperwien questions like: Who has cleared, who is deep in crisis? Is the form curve now pointing upwards or downwards? Unfortunately, no real trend could be identified for the CDU for a long time. Sometimes up, sometimes down, but the main thing is to keep up the pace.

Merz and the short fuse

At the end of June, my boss and I visited Friedrich Merz in the Konrad Adenauer House. The CDU chairman's office is right at the top and looks as if a plastic surgeon could reside there: flooded with light and discreetly furnished with light-colored furniture. Over the course of the year, I have always found Merz to be very relaxed in personal conversations. Even then, he was completely relaxed in his armchair. His long legs stretched out, his arms folded behind his head. He came across as someone who didn't want to radiate nervousness.

Yet friends and foes alike were once again mocking his short fuse. And the situation looked like it almost always does in the past year: the traffic light government was extremely unpopular, but the CDU/CSU did not get more than 30 percent in the polls. Things should have gone even better for Merz and co. But the CDU itself didn't really know where it wanted to go - and with whom.

Merz has first dibs on the chancellor candidacy. And in spring it looked as if his grip was already very firm. Then NRW Minister President Hendrik Wüst formulated a letter of application in the "FAZ" in the best Angela Merkel style. And Merz winced. The government in NRW was almost as unpopular as the traffic lights, he countered. There it was, the short fuse.

What did Merz say again and when?

Merz has made many decent speeches in the Bundestag this year, solid opposition work, quite worthy of a chancellor in waiting. In between, however, he has done his best to counteract this impression.

He called children of Arab origin "little pashas" and described the CDU as an "alternative for Germany with substance". In his newsletter "#MerzMail", he accused the Greens of having a "pervasive popular education attitude" and accused the media of using "every gendered news program" to gain votes for the AfD. The only thing to blame for the AfD's high poll numbers is the traffic light - and the radio stations affiliated with it. That's what it sounded like.

When we met Merz in his office, he was still weighing up whether he should really tackle the Greens so head-on. Just a few days later, he declared them to be the "main opponent" in the government. During the Bavarian election campaign, he simply excluded my adopted home district of Kreuzberg from Germany. And finally, he claimed that rejected asylum seekers were taking dentist appointments away from Germans.

If there's one thing I've learned this year, it's that whenever I think about giving the CDU a bit of credit for its comeback in a comment, Friedrich Merz always comes out with another one.

It's one thing not to get all the Merz quotes mixed up in their chronological order. It's quite another to want to keep up with Carsten Linnemann. In July, Merz appointed the long-time head of the economic wing as his new Secretary General. And because I wanted to know how Linnemann was approaching his new role, I went to his first appearances at grassroots level.

In Aschaffenburg, when visiting the sisters and brothers from the CSU, he had half an hour for me. We retired to a narrow kitchen next to the event hall. The pretzel rolls and breadsticks were already waiting there for the reception after Linnemann's speech. He was really reaching for them. He obviously had to take the carbohydrates wherever he could get them. Linnemann had only returned to his Berlin apartment at half past one in the morning, had slept briefly, gone for a run at six and then had a day full of appointments. By now it was seven o'clock in the evening.

Linnemann told me back then that he was now wide awake as soon as the alarm clock rang in the morning. Turn around again? Not a chance. Far too much to do. "I underestimated the force with which everything hit me at the beginning," he said. I found that surprisingly honest for someone who has been in the Bundestag since 2009.

A restless man among the helpless

When Merz offered him the position, Linnemann needed a few days to think about it. He was satisfied, he said in the kitchen between two sandwiches. After all, he had the job he always wanted: he, who had warned for years that the CDU was thematically empty, was to give the party a new basic program. That was exactly his thing, working on content and initiating debates. He had simply retained responsibility for the program. But there was much more to it. He first had to get used to no longer doing everything himself. It annoyed him "that I no longer get to answer every email in detail".

Back then, I experienced Linnemann as the perpetually restless one in a party of the still helpless.

In the kitchen, he dictated one idea after another into my pad. I could hardly keep up. At some point I gave up and put the pen down. Linnemann hardly gets a break in such conversations. If his counterpart doesn't get to the point, he interrupts. As he speaks, he is always on the move. He gesticulates, clenches his Becker fist, puts one leg over the other, then the other over the other. Standing leg and free leg? Not with Linnemann.

He presented the CDU's new colors with the same energy in the fall: Cadenabbia turquoise and Rhöndorf blue. And was a little surprised that the journalists present wanted to talk more about the visual similarities to the AfD color - and less about the "vitality, confidence and freedom" that Cadenabbia turquoise radiates.

The CDU has finally left Bonn behind

Shortly before Christmas, my boss and I were back in the Konrad Adenauer House, this time one floor down. The basic program had now been completed, there was an Advent wreath on the table and Linnemann's SC Paderborn had won. The CDU General would therefore have had every reason to be infected by the contemplative mood. But Linnemann was sitting on the edge of his chair, directly opposite us, as belligerent and energized as ever. You will soon read the result in stern.

The emphatically relaxed Merz, the always restless Linnemann - this is probably how the CDU continues to go up and down. But I have now found my rhythm with the party. If the colleagues from a friendly Hamburg magazine want to pass the days between the years with the next round of the CDU chancellor candidate question, then that's fine by them. I prefer to read Jürgen Rüttgers' new book.

Only once have I had the feeling that the CDU has really completely lost me: At a press conference with Friedrich Merz the other day, I was the only man in the room who had bothered to tie a tie in the morning. Merz? Open collar. That wouldn't have happened in Bonn times.