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Logo of the CDU: where does the party want to go?
Photo: Willi Schewski / IMAGO
The new basic program of the CDU should not be available until 2024 - but work on the new foundation of the party has begun.
First the draft of the preamble is ready, which is to be presented on Monday and which SPIEGEL has received.
On five pages, the authors of the responsible commission, chaired by the historian Andreas Rödder, describe the values on which the future policy program is to be based.
This, in turn, is being worked out by ten other specialist groups, and the deputy CDU chairman, Carsten Linnemann, is leading this process.
In an analysis of the bankruptcy of the Union in the federal elections last autumn, the historian and Christian Democrat Rödder initiated a debate about deleting the C in the name and thus sparked heated debates - but this is no longer mentioned in the present preamble.
"The basis of Christian Democratic politics is the Christian understanding of man," it says.
"On the basis of the Christian image of man, the CDU unites social, liberal and conservative attitudes and concerns."
However, the authors also emphasize that the party is open to all people “who – regardless of their own religious beliefs – share their basic values”.
The preamble seems to show how party leader Friedrich Merz imagines the modernization of the CDU after the disaster in the federal elections: climate change and environmental destruction are mentioned as a threat to "our lives and our ideas", but also concerns about prosperity and security.
The new CDU wants to be so modern that some of the paper almost sounds like the Greens - for example when it says: The promise of participation and advancement in Germany "is not yet being fulfilled for all people, because they because of their disadvantaged because of their gender or sexual orientation, their ethnic or social origin, because of their belief or their age or other characteristics".
CDU wants to continue to be a people's party
However, the Christian Democrats also emphasize their claim to continue to be a people's party.
"We trust in the idea of the People's Party and its importance for our democracy - today and in the future," says the preamble.
At the same time, the authors name the deficits that the party still has and must remedy on the way to becoming a modern people's party.
»This means that in the future more women will be involved in shaping politics and bring their interests to the CDU, as well as more people with a history of immigration and more young people.«
"The CDU needs lively debates and constructive arguments again," says Linnemann, head of the program and policy committee.
»Only in this way can we become recognizable again and come out on top with our own distinctive points.«
"Of course we didn't reinvent everything," says Rödder, chief author of the preamble.
"Rather, the Charter of Basic Values takes up the historical foundations of the CDU and translates them for the challenges of the 2020s."
The pre-predecessor of the current party leader Merz, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, had already initiated the process for the new basic program in 2018.
It has to be decided by a party congress at the end of the process.
Then it would be the fourth basic program of the CDU after 1978, 1994 and 2007.
Serap Güler, CDU member of the Bundestag and deputy head of the program and policy commission, says about the process: "The world today is much more complex and technical than it was 20 or 30 years ago." A modern people's party "must do justice to this complexity and this diversity".
Güler says: "We want to use this process to make it clear that the model of the People's Party is not from yesterday, but exactly the model of the future."
"For the CDU, it's about the claim of spiritual leadership, which combines a story of advancement for all citizens in Germany with the courage to deal with it," says Mario Voigt, Thuringia CDU parliamentary group leader and, like Güler, vice-chairman of the program and policy committee.
The CDU thus has a “special role in the middle of society”.