On the future of the CDU, or maybe on the future of Germany - Der Spiegel (Melanie Amann, Maik Baumgärtner, Lukas Eberle, Markus Feldenkirchen, Sebastian Fischer, Jan Friedmann, Florian Gathmann, Julia Amalia Heyer, Christoph Hickmann, Roman Höfner, Martin Knobbe, Veit Medick and Ann-Katrin Müller) on the crown prince:

'Such connections make it seem as though CDU’s right-wing bulwark is crumbling, despite the fact that the party was, for decades, able to bring all manner of conservatives under a single roof. Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, shaped the CDU into a catchall for mainstream conservatism stretching from the center to the far right. On Sundays, the C in CDU was emphasized, but during the week, the party made flexible, pragmatic policy decisions, offering something to all those who didn’t want to support the SPD and who wasn’t a communist.

In its early years, Adenauer’s party merged with smaller, competing conservative parties. Only the FDP survived. The right-wing margins were also included: In some regions, members of the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), a neo-Nazi party that was banned in 1952, were integrated into the CDU.

Adenauer’s goal was to prevent the rise of a competing nationalist party, and that remained a core concern for decades. Former CSU leader Franz Joseph Strauß and former Chancellor Helmut Kohl both adhered to the conviction that "no democratically legitimized party” was to exist to the right of the CDU. And that conviction held up for a long time.

Did Merkel neglect that conservative element and thus set off the decline of the CDU? Members of the Values Union see it that way. But the CDU’s tradition is very different: Under Adenauer and Kohl’s leadership, the CDU was not a programmatically conservative party. Only the party’s marketing was conservative; it was otherwise flexible to the point of self-abnegation.

Whereas the SPD was always interested in big projects, the Union always oriented itself towards people’s everyday lives. Franz Walter, a political scientist in the central German city of Göttingen, describes it as the "Christian Democratic magic formula.” He says, "The republic has changed since the late 1950s, but people have barely noticed. That is the CDU’s doing, but a majority of German citizens love that about the party.”'

(...)

'At the state parliament in Munich on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the session of the CSU state parliamentary group had just ended, and the state’s governor was walking down the halls of the Maximilianeum, the building housing Bavarian parliament. But Markus Söder wasn’t interested in commenting on the state of his sister party. He didn’t want it to look like he was interfering. And anyways, people close to Söder have argued, he has already said everything there is to say.

As if on cue, an interview with Söder had appeared that morning in the center-right daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It included a few rather interesting comments.

He does not believe, Söder told the paper, "that the CDU can succeed with a campaign platform from the past.” He said he doesn’t believe that a "return to nuclear power, return to mandatory military service, return to the old Union” will work. And: "A total break with the Merkel era would have fatal consequences for the Union overall.”

One could reach such comments as a clear rejection of Friedrich Merz and his retro approach. The CSU’s leadership has moved away from believing it can win back voters from the AfD by simply moving far enough to the right. It is a lesson they learned the hard way in the last Bavarian state election in 2018. Now, Söder is giving his policies a green tinge, a strategy that has secured a surprisingly wide range of support in Bavaria – perhaps suggesting that he could actually be an ideal chancellor candidate for the Union. That, though, he has repeatedly insisted, is not his goal.

Söder wouldn’t be Söder if he didn’t quickly also cut the three aspirants from his sister party down to size. In the interview, he said that, although Laschet, Merz and Spahn are "suited for leadership duties,” the "polls also show that there is no broad majority of support for them among the Germans.”

In other words: The CDU has no suitable candidate, which means that either Merkel would need to run once more. Or Söder would have to give it a go.

As a result, the state of the CDU is more muddled than at any time since the 1999 donation scandal that propelled Merkel up the party leadership ladder. The party no longer knows what it wants to be – and the discussions in the coming days and weeks will center so much on leadership questions that there will hardly be any time left to discuss its policies.

If it chooses Merz, the party would be represented by very personification of the aughts -- in 2021.

If it goes with Laschet, it would be pinning its hopes on a figure of peace and comfort at a time when the world is remaking itself.

And if it settles on Spahn, the CDU would be attempting to replicate the model embodied by Sebastian Kurz, the young Austrian chancellor. But Jens Spahn is no Sebastian Kurz. He is Jens Spahn.

All three must fear ending up behind the Greens. And a coalition in which the Greens are the larger partner and the CDU-CSU is the smaller one would not only be the greatest humiliation, but also the end of the party as we have known it. The destructive forces would simply be too strong.'

Read the article here.

You don't need to be a supporter of the CDU to realize that the demise of the CDU would be a catastrophe, for Germany and probably Europe. To those who believe that the demise would lead to a leftist revolution I can only say: dream on, the revolution will be coming from the right and it won't be a pretty one.

We must not rule out a certain sense of sanity. If even Söder appears to believe that moving to the right isn't the way to win back voters from the AfD, then a tiny bit of hope may be justified.