this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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A new Grand Coalition is extremely likely but it wouldn't be the same as before at all.
A bit of a long overview which will include some personal coloring-in:
CDU and CSU (the latter being Bavaria-only; commonly called the "Union", or on Feddit "CxU") are not particularly Christian. They do have a large number of church-goers—but I guess those people separate very clearly between faith and action. They are simply conservatives: Protecting "family values", protecting established capitalists over either people or new industries, cutting into social systems, insisting on low-debt state finances, protecting fossil interests, not really protecting nature, being Atlanticists for the most part.
Merkel was supposedly one of the most left-wing CDU people, and we did see a few progressive wins in her 16 years as the chancellor, such as allowing a law legalizing gay marriage to pass. Mostly though, we didn't see all that many regressive things.
We also saw a lot of things just get stuck and handled in unsustainable ways. German consumers were heating their homes with then-cheap Russian gas. German industry got ever more dependent on then-cheap Russian gas and on outsourcing, as well as selling to the Chinese. Ministers successfully protected coal interests [20k employees] against a burgeoning domestic solar/wind industry [100k employees at its height], and concentrated all efforts on producing fossil-powered cars for export. German road infrastructure continued to expand, but existing road and rail infrastructure crumbled, as the "privatized" Deutsche Bahn got less punctual by the year. We accidentally turned into an immigration country in 2015, which would have been completely anathema for CxU in the 90s and 00s. In 2015, the slogan "refugees welcome" was everywhere but when volunteer support eventually faltered, we failed to institutionalize integration efforts properly. At the end of the Merkel era, pretty much all of this exploded in the new coaliton's faces.
Also, throughout the Merkel era, some pretty far-right people got into important positions. E.g.: Kristina Schröder who counterfactually equated level/quality of left-wing and right-wing extremism. Wolfgang Schäuble who was both very close to Merkel and economically extremely harmful on the EU level. Even Jens Spahn, former minister of health who's now one of the major connections into Trumpistan.
Since the end of the Merkel era, the CxU have veered right quite significantly. Ursula von der Leyen (now on the EU level) is the last real remainder of the Merkel era, and even she is veering right.
The new CDU leader is Friedrich Merz, and he's kind of the anti-Merkel: He is nakedly power-hungry, scheming, divisive, tantrum-throwing, unempathetic. And he's collecting asshats around him, like Linnemann or aforementioned Spahn (now the CDU "expert" on everything under the sun and not even a bit ashamed that he sunk hundreds of millions of Euros into extremely overpriced Covid masks, even as they were no longer needed).
Under Merz, CxU are now looking to capitalize on right-wing populist themes, which ironically were largely coined in response to Merkel policies. They somehow haven't yet realized that the original right-wing populists hate them and want CxU to go away. [Quite literally, the people now shouting "Hang the Ampel coalition" used to be shouting "Merkel must go!".]
Thank you.