The CDU has found its focus - thanks to gendernization and Hamas

There are good reasons to be grateful to the conservatives. However, the CDU believes it can distinguish the true Germany from the untrue. In doing so, it is jeopardizing the values it wants to impose.

Germany has become more left-wing and dishonest over the last few decades, but rarely has this been more evident than at the end of 2023. The dishonesty is evident in both large and small ways. Let's start with the small things - this is a column, after all.

Just in time for Christmas, a dispute breaks out over a Christmas tree. A daycare center in Hamburg-Lokstedt didn't have one of these coniferous plants, and some parents were outraged. Markus Söder, that truffle pig for angry mushrooms, immediately took up the issue: "That's absurd. Don't we have any other problems? Christmas includes a Christmas tree," he tweeted, as if we had no other problems.

The left and the despondent reacted as they always do when someone defends German culture: hysterically. Söder's critics and apologists for a culturally neutral Germany now spoke of "fake news" and thus adopted the daycare center's assessment completely uncritically.

Criminal complaint - Merry Christmas!

"Fake news"? Did the daycare center have a Christmas tree after all? No - or rather, it did for a very short time, because plant retailer Florian Schröder put one there without further ado. The daycare center, in turn, filed a criminal complaint. Merry Christmas! And didn't the daycare center justify its decision not to use the (incidentally pagan) fir tree on the grounds of cultural neutrality? Yes, yes, "religious freedom" was the reason. The only thing that Söder and other critics didn't provide was the fact that there isn't a tree in the daycare center every year anyway. As if that changed everything.

There is a great deal of multicultural prejudice, which brings us to the big one: hatred of Jews. Whether art, science, the left or organized Muslims, large sections of German society have failed in a shameful, icy way after 7 October. Friends of Israel bravely shout addresses of solidarity into the gray December sky, but even these rallies are now sparsely attended. And where civil society can no longer bring itself to have a cultural, even militant identity, at some point the state moves in.

And that brings us to the CDU. The party is finding its focus in this mess: it is drafting a basic program and striking a note that it has not dared to strike before. It is a right-wing program and a reaction to a failing, attitudeless left-wing society."Greta Thunberg has turned me to the right", I admitted here recently, and the conservative People's Party seems to feel the same way.

Leitkultur like it's 1998

Gender gaga, left-wing and Muslim anti-Semitism have given German conservatism what it lacked: focus and determination. Merz and his CDU have found the pulse of society and have a good chance of replacing the traffic light ruins sooner or later. And what will happen then?

In its draft basic program, the CDU is more open to nuclear power than even the AfD. It wants to better secure the EU's external borders. However, it is their cultural ideas that make us prick up our ears: "A diverse society needs a German Leitkultur. A set of rules that strengthens social cohesion."

Leitkultur - this has been wafting through the CDU for over twenty years, but now it is becoming more concrete: For example, the CDU wants to ban "grammatically incorrect gender language" at universities, on the radio and at state institutions. And it is making a statement to Muslims: "Muslims who share our values belong to Germany." And, crystal clear: "Sharia law does not belong to Germany."

Germany is not a Christmas goose

This is a departure from "Islam belongs to Germany", as spelled out by Christian Wulff and embodied by Angela Merkel. The culture war in the basic program may bring a Christmas sparkle to the eyes of some conservatives, but for me it makes my stomach clench like a pack of dominoes.

"Muslims who share our values belong to Germany" - neither the preconditions nor the consequences of this sentence are even vaguely outlined. What values? How do you share them? What happens if a Muslim no longer belongs to Germany?

More important than these ambiguities is the fundamental error in thinking: sentences in which politicians determine who or what belongs to Germany and what does not are an encroachment that despises freedom. Anyone who speaks like this is simply a populist. Populists see themselves as born spokespeople for the people; they claim to have the authority to distinguish the true Germany from the untrue. Anyone who talks like the CDU wants to cook Germany according to a recipe. But Germany is not a Christmas goose.

When is a country a country?

A country is not created by decree, but by its people and their daily hustle and bustle: through decisions, mistakes, attitudes, surveys, debates, books, celebrations, successes and defeats, products and services, traditions and hypes, through alliances, upheavals, junk and art. It is not defined by what a party wants and what a state decrees. It's basically like the Christmas tree: whether it belongs to Christmas is determined by the daycare center or plant retailer Florian Schröder, but not by Prime Minister Markus Söder.

Anyone who wants to tell the Germans how they should speak has one foot in totalitarianism. Gender bans, such as those now being passed in Hesse, are measures that serve no purpose. It is a form of rage protection for all those who have to clench their fists at every "teacher". In this way, the state is protecting sensitivities - and thus using the toolbox of left-wing identity politics.

State culture is also a breach of constitutional taboo, especially for a nationally organized party. Politicized culture is rightly under suspicion in Germany. The state is not supposed to direct thinking, which is why the Basic Law relegates state cultural influence to the state level: education, media, culture - these are all matters for the states and not for Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

A grave for freedom

The irony is bitter: the CDU is reacting to Jew-hatred and social arbitrariness by imposing values and thus endangering them itself. It is digging a grave for what is being defended all over the world, whether in Iran, Ukraine or Israel: freedom. Freedom is the essence of Western democracies. It is the fundamental idea deeply engraved in every article of the Basic Law.

I am grateful to the conservatives: They stand united loudly and firmly on the side of Israel like no one else. They are a bulwark against the omnipresent poison of anti-Semitism, a bulwark against the extermination of the Jews. Society needs conservatism.

But this conservatism scares me. And I'm not even Muslim.