Selling the Conservative Family’s Silver?

Two weeks after its defeat in federal elections, a disagreement on the future course for Germany's conservative opposition has broken out within the Christian Democratic Union.

On Friday, CDU chairwoman Angela Merkel, who was also recently elected to head the opposition in parliament, told a German newsmagazine the conservatives should give greater priority to environmental and family concerns in order to gain the support of women and liberal urban voters.

Though the Sept. 22 election ended with the CDU and Schröder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) neck-and-neck -- each with 38.5 percent of the vote -- the Green Party’s gains ensured the SPD-Green coalition led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder could stay in power. Now Edmund Stoiber -- the joint chancellor candidate for the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union -- has returned to his duties as Bavarian premier and left the national stage open to Merkel, his pre-election rival.

Mixed messages

After having taken a backseat to Stoiber even before the campaign began, Merkel has emerged from the election with far greater power. She quickly made it clear that she wanted to be the opposition leader in the Bundestag and got her way when, shortly after the Union bloc's election defeat, predecessor Friedrich Merz resigned as chairman of the parties' parliamentary group.

But it's hard to tell where Merkel’s going. Only a week ago she told the press it wasn’t time to debate the CDU’s values or strategies. “The basic direction of the party is right,” Merkel contested. But now she appears to have had a change of heart. Or has she?

In July, while the election campaign was in full force, Stoiber appointed Katharina Reiche, a single mother, to be his representative for family policy and, thus, a likely cabinet minister if he were to be elected. The move generated considerable resistance from staunch conservatives, who claimed that the unwed Reiche wasn’t competent to deal with family policy. After a brief internal debate Reiche was granted the full post afterall. Merkel’s rather cryptic response was that the discussion was “not okay.”

Speaking to the press over the weekend, Merkel pointed out that 40 percent of men voted CDU/CSU, while only 37 percent of women did. “We lack that three percent – with it we would have won the election,” the party leader said. Merkel contested that the conservatives’ poor results in the cities were due to the Green Party’s successes there. She added that the conservatives’ traditional family policies have failed to win support from so-called “patchwork families.”

Conservatives at odds

The Union bloc has divided into two camps, with influential party members falling on both sides of the discussion. Merkel's internal opponents have criticized her comments as being contrary to the CDU’s fundamental values.

Brandenburg CDU leader Jörg Schönbohm warned of "selling the conservative family’s silver.“

“If the CDU picks up on leftist-liberal issues conservative, voters will look for other representatives," he told the newsweekly "Der Spiegel." "Left shouldn’t be confused with modern.”

According to another leading conservative politician, Saarland Premier Peter Müller, the election was the CDU’s second worst showing ever. He said the gains could only be credited to the CDU’s sister party, the more conservative CSU.

“Of the 1.1 million additional votes (since the 1998 election), around 1 million went exclusively to the CSU,” he said. Müller has called on his party to come up with a critical analysis of election results.

The debate over whether to "modernize" the party, as some have put it, is likely to simmer for weeks to come. And the fact that Merkel initiated the debate may have negative consequences for her. Next month she’s up for re-election for the position of party chairwoman. With Jörg Schönbohm’s vehement resistance to “modernization,” Merkel may already have one member of the party executive standing against her.