The Mistakes of the CDU in the Election Battle
Self criticism is not presently in demand in the CDU. As long as the party believes it has real chances to form the next government, all energies will be focused on returning to power. But it can also be useful to quickly draw the necessary conclusions from the election result. And who knows, perhaps new elections will occur soon? The Union will survive better if it learns from its errors. What then does the party have to learn?
1. In reunited Germany the majority of the voters is located left of center. A right, civically-liberal majority is possible either only with inclusion of the Greens, in a catastrophic economic emergency, or with a charismatic candidate (male or female). Our Basic Law (Grundgesetz) does not allow the popular election of the chancellor; however, the personal charisma of the candidate is of significant importance for the success of the party. If anybody still had any doubts about that, the recent election campaign must have changed their beliefs.
2. The readiness of Germans for reform is a fantasy; even today it does not go beyond a general acknowledgment. As soon as it starts to hurt, the voters want to know nothing more of reforms. Whoever does not want to wait until the country is fairing so poorly that finally a majority is ready for painful reforms, should only act out of responsibility, and leave all ethical thinking aside, and should not tell the people the whole truth about their party's reform program before the election (particularly if there is a heinous opponent to deal with). In the end, nothing good comes from it, unless one does it. For starters, one must come into a position to be able to do something. That way the people will not be unnecessarily frightened; reforms cannot be presented as treacherous, they must be sold to the people. No dentist runs his practice like a horror chamber and displays his torture instruments. Rather, he does everything possible to calm his patients down.
3. In order to eliminate the voters' fear of free market reforms, before anything else, the association with cold-heartedness surrounding all reforms must be eliminated. It is not enough for a party to achieve, in the view of the voters, the highest economic expertise; this must be paired with high social expertise.
Most Germans today may still accept the order of our society and industry as well as the social market economy intellectually, but no longer emotionally, they regard them as an anti-social free-market economy.
Ludwig Erhard, the founder of the social market economy, was aware that building confidence in the domestic economic system was extremely important. He always appealed therefore both to the minds and hearts of Germans. His successors, however, believed, in light of constantly-growing prosperity and the deterring alternative in form of the GDR, that the social market economy remained a self-propelled machine and stopped advertising for it, particularly with moral arguments.
That bitterly avenges itself today. Particularly, Erhard's party inadvertently left the highest interpretation of the word "social" to their political opponents and accepted that the "social" is understood here as foreign, even contradictory, to the free-market economy. Ever since the Union was not able to trump this mistake with national windfalls, they have lost every election.
The CDU can therefore only win again when the party finally exerts itself again to make the voters understand that "market" and "morals" are not opposites.
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Stefan Baron is Editor-in-Chief of the German economic magazine WirtschaftsWoche and a Member of the AICGS Board of Trustees.
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This article appeared in the September 30, 2005 AICGS Advisor. It was translated into English by Matthew Wiggins.
This essay originally appeared in the September 22, 2005 WirtschaftsWoche. For the original German version, please click here.