“Then the alarm bells must ring”: the CDU’s social wing is on a confrontation course with Merz

With “CDU pure” “a line was sold that was supposed to be as hard and edgy as possible,” wrote Radtke. But that means Merz has the party too one-sidedly conservativeat the expense of the liberal and Christian social currents in the party.

Radtke complained that the Social wing marginalized in the Merz CDU to the detriment of the entire party “Anyone who declares the Christian-social element to be nonsense and its representatives to be a pain in the ass is consistently missing the core and the former successful concept of Christian democracy.”

Radtke criticized the claim that we are currently not living up to the claim of being “the party of hard-working people”. “If 70 percent of the voters we lost in Saxony-Anhalt say that the CDU doesn’t care about employees, then the alarm bells must ring.”

Before the 2025 federal election, party leader Merz and his then general secretary Carsten Linnemann had propagated an orientation for the CDU under the slogan “pure CDU”, which was characterized by a “clear edge” rhetoric, for example in migration and economic policy, and was strongly based on the fact that the CDU would not make any far-reaching compromises in its core thematic areas.

This rhetoric not only led to a thematic narrowing, but also raised expectations “that could not be met one-to-one in a coalition,” Radtke wrote to the CDA members. “Looking for compromises within the Union and then implementing as much of it as possible in a coalition is the right approach.”

That the CDU does that Office of Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt may be handed over to the AfD must be a “historic low point,” wrote Radtke. “There is a lot at stake: our historical and political heritage as Christian Democrats.”

The CDU has to do it sharpen your social profile and the employee wing CDA will “intervene” in this, Radtke wrote. The CDU’s message must be: “People are not a cost factor. Work is more than a number on a balance sheet. And social security is not a weakness of our social market economy, but one of its prerequisites.”