The election victory in Hesse has given party leader Friedrich Merz breathing room in the CDU’s power struggle. But the K question still hangs over him. Will Wüst and Co. still intercept him?
Markus, a silverback from the CSU recently told me, with an eye on the long lines and the comparatively poor election results of the CSU, Markus is doing well. He doesn’t have a Söder. Just like Horst Seehofer had a Söder. Namely in the neck. Lurking and always up for “dirty things,” as Seehofer himself once put it during the years of this power struggle. The Stoiber, on the other hand, the silverback went back further, had his Seehofer, and the Ostrich his Streibl. And Streibl has his Stoiber. The dagger always tickled in the back, and the younger successor always brought down the older predecessor when the time came. Archaic, like in a wolf pack. Man is a wolf to man, said Thomas Hobbes. Especially the party friend to the party friend.
The head of the sister party CDU doesn’t have it as good as Markus Söder. Friedrich Merz, whom they call “Fritze” in the CDU, has to fend off a veritable small mob that has followed on his trail. A few days ago, the core of this pack danced together at a unity party in Hamburg. A dim, blurry video shows Daniel Günther, Kai Wegner and Hendrik Wüst dancing together.
The Schleswig-Holstein Prime Minister and CDU state leader occupies a special position in this trio. Günther has always been politically to the left of Merz, or has been for a very long time, so he was on the right side of a power struggle. While Wegner, the Governing Mayor of Berlin, and Wüst, Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, have changed sides. Because there is now the space for positioning against Merz. The three dancers from Hamburg can therefore be called the “Günther Gang” with some justification.
Karin Prien was whistled back
Also because Daniel Günther, to stay in the wolf image, ate the most chalk and also wore his grandmother’s night cap to camouflage himself. He looks and acts as if neither flies nor Friedrich have anything to be afraid of. Which doesn’t change the fact that he acts like a wolf. He recently had his state minister Karin Prien whistled out of a meeting in Kiel in the morning because she had spoken out twice, most recently early in the morning of the same day, in favor of a joint vote between the Thuringia CDU and the AfD, i.e. taking a Merz position had. Günther overruled Prien on the question, and from then on nothing more was heard about it. Wegner and Wüst also found themselves in Merz’s opponent camp in Thuringia.
The Günther Gang is the Andean Pact of today. At that time, a traveling group of young, ambitious CDU men decided to inherit Helmut Kohl. This is what happened on an educational trip organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. On July 25, 1979, the twelve, including Roland Koch and Günther Oettinger, flew to Santiago de Chile on a night flight in a Douglas DC-8. “Exhilarated by the whisky,” as “Spiegel” wrote for the first time decades later, they had written a manifesto on the Venezuelan airline’s stationery: “In concern for the high-profile delegation and to protect health, we hereby join forces to form the Pacto Andino Segundo. ” An allusion to the South American community of states of the same name. “More ambience in politics” was their declared goal, which translated meant: This cardigan cabbage has to go.
You shoot capercaillies on the courting grounds
The members of the Günther gang also have the feeling that Merz is once again past his sell-by date. With the small difference that the 69-year-old Merz still wants to get to where the Andinos wanted Kohl away in 2025: in the Chancellery.
As is well known, in the end it was not one of the CDU freedom fighters, but rather a woman about whom the unforgettable Michael Glos from the CSU once said that she knew exactly: you have to shoot capercaillies on the courting ground. And so Angela Merkel quietly and completely killed all the roosters in the Latin American highlands, one after the other. And became Chancellor.
