The Union is the jitteriest party in Germany

Markus Söder said something interesting these days. Against the beautiful backdrop of the Andechs Monastery, the Bavarian Prime Minister took on the traffic light government in Berlin.

The coalition must stop driving “a new sow through the village” every day, demanded the Christian Social. According to Söder’s thesis, people would go completely crazy in this mess.

There is of course something to it, but it’s funny to hear the number with the sow from Söder’s mouth of all things. To say that he likes to drive one around the village every now and then would be an understatement. At times it almost seems as if he frees an entire pigsty. A brief overview of the past few months: Söder announces a Bavarian construction program. Söder calls for the revision of citizen money. Söder is pushing for the continued operation of nuclear power plants. Söder wants to strengthen biofuels, intensify border controls and launch a state action plan for sexual diversity. This week Söder called for relief when shopping.

If people go crazy at the traffic light confusion, in the case of Söders they should have been in inpatient treatment for a long time.

The Union needs a core

It’s clear that it’s better to think about politics than to stop the business. Media want headlines. In addition, there is an election campaign in Bavaria and the AfD is still there.

But Söder’s actionism points to a fundamental problem of the CDU and CSU: the Union is too jittery, too disordered, it gets bogged down. Hardly a day goes by without a new advance.

This week alone: ​​Carsten Linnemann, the new CDU General, calls for fast-track procedures for swimming pool brawlers. Thorsten Frei, the parliamentary group manager, wants to abolish the fundamental right to asylum. And the CSU is immediately presenting a whole catalog of ideas, from abolishing inheritance tax and tripling the tax research allowance to a complete reform of the healthcare system. It almost seems as if the Union is following the Sigmar Gabriel textbook for entertaining but unsuccessful opposition politics.

Nothing speaks against setting up a program, not even far from power. But the Union is always good when it exudes calm and sovereignty. The era of Angela Merkel often seemed like a leaden time. Her style corresponded to the conservative attitude to life, just not putting anything upside down, but certainly more than the buzzing top behavior with which the troops of Markus Söder and Friedrich Merz are going to work these weeks.

So does the Union simply have to go to sleep in order to gain new confidence? Of course not. But it would be nice if a proposal were carried through a little longer. So that you know where the CDU and CSU want to go, very roughly. The Union needs a core, a clarification of the question of what the two or three fields are in which it has domain competence or still wants to develop it. Is that the economy? The internal secruity? The energy policy? Possibly even migration policy? At the moment it seems as if the Union wants to appear a bit everywhere. She needs more courage for minimalism.

One did it: Olaf Scholz. For months in 2021, he talked about nothing but social issues, about the minimum wage, citizen income, and stabilizing the pension level. You couldn’t hear it anymore. But in the end he became chancellor.