Something special is happening in Schleswig-Holstein.

Daniel Günther is the first Prime Minister of the CDU to opt for the Greens, although he would also have a majority with the FDP.

The FDP in Schleswig-Holstein is a state association that could govern at least as well and solidly as the Greens.

It was not for nothing that Günther's alleged dream constellation would have been the continuation of the Jamaica coalition.

Then why not with the FDP?

This is more than just a day-to-day political decision.

She says that the bourgeois CDU can govern better with the less bourgeois Greens than with the bourgeois FDP.

Elsewhere, the CDU, as the strongest governing party, may govern out of embarrassment with the Greens (as in Hesse or perhaps soon in North Rhine-Westphalia);

in Kiel she obviously does it out of deep conviction.

It would therefore be incomplete to attribute Günther's decision solely to his pragmatism and climate policy image cultivation.

The CDU is making a directional decision, even if it will certainly be downplayed in the near future: Kiel is not the republic.

But the movement of the party in the federal government is not such that one could say that Kiel is out of the ordinary.

In Berlin, the CDU/CSU are not making people forget that the FDP is failing as a social and market-economy regulatory power.

Enchanted by the greens

The Liberals are currently just as enchanted as the Union, the Greens seem irresistible.

So one stone falls after the other: in unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, in pension policy (if any), in debt.

It is an irony of history that the CDU and the Greens now often stand side by side, even on security policy.

Within the Union, the “programmatic renewal” has thus also been decided.

Because it is hardly to be expected that the CDU will blink in the direction of the Greens across the board, but then programmatically turn in the direction of the FDP.

You can also put it this way: It is a late victory for Angela Merkel.

Friedrich Merz will not like to hear that, but he too will have to accept the fact that a liberal, market-oriented Union that could clearly distinguish social justice in the Christian tradition from red-green is currently not in sight.

The motto is: How do we regain power?

This doesn't have to be bad advice.

But it exposes the CDU to the danger that the FDP is also threatened with.

Many voters will no longer know who they actually voted for.

And above all: for what.