Fried - View from Berlin - Will Angela Merkel leave the CDU?
There is news that doesn't seem particularly significant on its own, but it does when you ask yourself the question: Is there more to come? Angela Merkel has left the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS). This was recently reported by "Der Spiegel". The KAS is, as they say, a think tank close to the CDU. The former chancellor and long-time party leader sat on the board. Friedrich Merz has now taken her place. Is there more to come?
The chairman of the KAS, Norbert Lammert, tried to persuade Merkel to stay on months ago - in vain. Merkel has been around long enough to know that October 3, 2021 will now be remembered. In Halle, she gave her last speech as Chancellor on the Day of German Unity. At the time, Merkel reported on an article that had appeared a year earlier - in a book published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. It said of the Chancellor: "She, who came to the CDU as a 35-year-old with the ballast of her GDR biography in the days of the fall of communism, could of course not have been socialized from the bottom up to be a CDU plant of the old Federal Republic." 35 years of life, nothing but ballast? Merkel was very annoyed by this, also, according to the Chancellor at the time in Halle, because many East Germans "experienced such assessments again and again". The word "ballast" was like a "little punch in the stomach" for her, she said recently on ZDF television.
On her departure from the KAS, Merkel said that her decision was not directed against the foundation. She just wanted to shape her life freely. The ballast episode was also reportedly not a decisive factor. Nevertheless, the question arises: how much of Merkel's gradual withdrawal from the CDU world is personal retirement planning - and how much is growing distance? Doesn't the ballast episode exemplify Merkel's and the CDU's realization that only things that never fit together become estranged? Is it conceivable that she might even end up leaving the party?
Angela Merkel and the ballast
Merkel made it clear early on that she no longer wanted to play an active role in the CDU, in line with her successors. Even during the 2021 election campaign, she was reluctant to be persuaded to make appearances for the chancellor candidate Armin Laschet. She declined the honorary chairmanship, partly because, if taken seriously, it would have meant attending committee meetings. Now she is turning her back on the KAS - another couple of meetings less. One might say: Merkel is shedding ballast.
But it seems very unlikely that she will leave the CDU altogether. Merkel knows that she owes a lot to the party. And she can live with the fact that, conversely, some people today act as if Merkel has harmed the party. The fact that her former rival Friedrich Merz leads the party and parliamentary group will not cause her to go into raptures, but neither will it drive her out of the Union.
Merkel can read here and there these days that people in the CDU and its milieu have reacted with a huff to her departure from the KAS. Companions felt left alone, they say. The "Welt" headline above her commentary read: "Merkel lets her party down." Merkel is presumably amused by an ambivalence that she has been observing for some time. Although the CDU is constantly calling for and pursuing a fresh start to overcome the Merkel era, it always causes irritation when she actually takes another step to the side.
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Source: www.stern.de
