Start of the Union's election campaign: Laschet against “Continue

Armin Laschet's father helped the candidate for chancellor of the Union parties six months ago to gain the presidency of the CDU;

at that time he put the memory of the deceased miner at the beginning of his application speech.

Now he also accompanies him in the election campaign: The Union party's election commercial begins with the sentence “My father was a miner” and shows the candidate in the picture.

In the little film, Laschet goes on to say that as Prime Minister he closed the last colliery, so he knows what change means.

Johannes Leithäuser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Laschet presented his political panorama at the start of the election campaign of the Union parties on Saturday in Berlin: no “business as usual” in foreign policy;

In future, European security forces would have to be able to cope with a situation like the one at Kabul Airport on their own.

A national security council is required for the federal government.

Laschet: SPD and Greens indefinite on questions of internal security

Laschet described the Greens as an unreliable party in terms of foreign policy;

In the last Afghanistan mandate, half of their MPs voted against the deployment of the Bundeswehr, a quarter in favor and a quarter abstained.

He reproached the SPD for not keeping commitments to NATO to increase the German defense budget.

Both are equally indeterminate when it comes to questions of internal security.

The Union's top candidate also declined other policy areas: Greens, Leftists, SPD, they all have tax increases in their program, the Union rejects that.

In the fight against climate change, it was not always new bans that helped, but inventions and innovations so that industrial jobs could remain in Germany.

What Laschet was trying to illustrate using individual examples, the secretaries-general of the CDU and CSU had put forward in general terms: the preparation for a camp election campaign.

Paul Ziemiak and Markus Blume warned against “left experiments” and instead promoted “reliability for Germany”.

Blume described the SPD as a "party of burden" and the Greens as a "party of bans".

The head of the CSU regional group in the Bundestag, Alexander Dobrindt, spoke of a "big decision on direction", it was about order or "left chaos," about "upswing or downswing", about "relief or burden".

Söder warns of a difficult election campaign

The CSU chairman Markus Söder also tried to set dramatic sentiment signals. Söder predicted that it would be “very scarce” on election evening, and for a long time it was no longer a question of who the Union would rule with, but rather whether it would govern at all, or whether “a left alliance” would Bring majority together. It will be "the hardest election campaign since 1998", that is to say since the year in which the Union lost its government majority to the SPD and the Greens for the last time.

Söder appeared in the Berlin Tempodrom, the venue for the start of the election campaign, as if he were the host of both Union parties CSU “, but enthusiastically praised Angela Merkel's government performance, as if he were already giving her farewell speech.

Merkel's farewell marked “the end of a really great era”, said Söder, “16 extraordinarily successful years”, “an outstanding balance sheet”.

The CSU chairman addressed the chancellor directly: "Dear Angela, respect and thanks, you have protected our country well".

And he added the usual CSU formula that is always used for self-criticism: "We have not always made it easy for you."

Merkel speaks about the "tragedy of Afghanistan"

The Chancellor, on the other hand, did not want to have anything to do with a balance sheet.

She took the time to point out that during her tenure, unemployment had more than halved, new debt had fallen to zero, and the proportion of climate-friendly electricity generation had risen from ten to well over 40 percent.

But then Merkel preferred to talk about current concerns, that is, about the “tragedy of Afghanistan”, and admitted the failure of the West.

It was not just about preventing Afghanistan from continuing to be a source of Islamist terror.

The intentions of the West, including Germany, were “broader”, they had “wanted to enable as many as possible a free, good, self-determined life”, especially women and girls;

in the end this did not succeed.

So Angela Merkel stayed in the enclosure of her current worries, governing remains her everyday life until the end, no longer the election campaigns. She praised Laschet, described his political stations, to which he was now "deeply convinced" that he would add the office of Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. "All the best on this way, all strength in the last few hours", Merkel called out to Laschet at the end, as if he had been a visitor in her office and now on the way to the door.

Söder, on the other hand, at the end of his appearance expressly placed himself in the Laschet team and even insisted that the candidate for chancellor should play a prominent role. Laschet, who has to cope with poor popularity ratings, has promised more often in the past few days that he wanted to put other members of his team more in the foreground, his former competitor Friedrich Merz was there for a greeting and stated, “You can do Armin Laschet the country entrust ".

Söder, on the other hand, said that leadership teams are a nice thing; but in the end it "always depends on the candidate for chancellor". And Söder, yes, also a former competitor of Laschet, assured: "Dear Armin, you can rely on my support."