They want to be people’s parties – the CDU and SPD. They don’t listen or pay attention to the people on a central issue. They can therefore be called “forgotten of duty”, to quote an expression from former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker.
Our truly wonderful liberal democracy is in grave danger. Populist-authoritarian systems are on the rise all around: America, France, the Netherlands, now also in Austria, and in Eastern Europe for a long time. It would be particularly important for Germany, which is still important and influential, to hold up the flag of freedom and democracy – I put it deliberately so pathetically.
Merz and Scholz: the unpopular candidates for chancellor
The centrist democratic parties must therefore have the absolute ambition to become as strong as possible in the next federal election, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of our common good. To do this, they would have to present themselves to voters as attractively as possible without becoming populist.
An important attractive feature is the top staff, i.e. the top candidates who are billboarded nationwide and are intended to attract voters. The popular parties of earlier times followed this political truism: the Union almost always put the most popular party at the forefront. With Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrats had candidates for chancellor who exhausted the voter reservoir far beyond their core electorate. So these were real “electoral locomotives”.
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The Union and the SPD are doing nothing of the sort today. Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz’s personal poll numbers remain far behind the forecast percentages for the CDU/CSU. In North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst, there is a party friend who is much more popular nationwide. But Friedrich Merz remains stubborn in his personal ambition. The poll numbers for his party have remained around 30 percent for a long time, despite the historic weakness of his political opponents.
Not even the SPD believes in Olaf Scholz
Things are even worse with the SPD: Olaf Scholz is the most unpopular chancellor since the Federal Republic was founded. His approval ratings remain in the basement. Even within his own party there is enormous skepticism. And the SPD could field Boris Pistorius, the most popular German politician. What an opportunity for the comrades to really catch up. But Scholz, who has obviously never experienced self-doubt, still thinks he is the best and is taking his party hostage. The delegates follow him like the famous lemmings and, despite all his failures, made him a candidate for chancellor again.
The personal ambition of Scholz and Merz is one thing. But the fact that the parties allow themselves to be so incapacitated or become incapacitated themselves at this time, which is so crucial for democracy, is the other, the really bad thing.
“Forgetful of duty”, to use the expression of the great Richard von Weizsäcker a second time. And the right-wing extremist Höcke-Weidel AfD is now becoming more and more radical, more and more brazen and more and more powerful.
