It is after a good 25 years in a relationship with more Downs than UPS. Angela Merkel and Horst Seehofer stand for the power of the Union parties. Now both the history of the party top to end.
The day in November 2015 remains a low point in the relationship between Angela Merkel and Horst Seehofer. At the CSU party Congress in Munich, the party leader and Bavarian Prime Minister rüffelt the Chancellor and CDU party Chairman. With cutting words. It comes to the reception of refugees, the demand for a “ceiling”. It is autumn, the changing of Germany. Seehofer condemning Merkel. It is a good 15 minutes next to him on the stage, then, without a word.
Since the recording of up to one Million refugees in Germany, the ratio of the party leaders of the sister parties CDU and CSU is massively disrupted. Before the first weekend of September 2015, the Austrian government had contacted Merkel and reception of refugees asked, who were stranded in Hungary.
Of all the end of the conflict: asylum seeker determining on the German border in Bavaria 2015
The Chancellor called overnight policy Familiar, the SPD chief and the SPD foreign Minister, several of the CDU-Federal Ministers. CSU-Chef Seehofer not reached. In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany there are a lot of phone calls that were political Soft. In this case, a phone call led ensured that two people were never more truly to each other.
The upper limit of refugees
The CSU party Congress in 2015, ten weeks after the beginning of the largest refugee intake. Unanimously the delegates to limit the number of refugees. Merkel also rejects at the party. “We need to put all the force on a European solution,” she says. “Foreclosure and doing nothing is not a solution in the 21st century. Century.” Merkel wants a European concept and not one country alone.
Here, the East German scientist from the Evangelical parsonage, 64 years of age, also understand in the policy, development and much like a programming wants to decrypt. There the Frankish Catholic from a working-class family, full-blood politician between Bonn and Munich and Berlin, the – say it has its Fans as its critics – political instinct as a few in Germany. With his counter-position to the Chancellor, he is following a party tradition. In the era of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) and Minister-President Franz-Josef Strauß (CSU) in the seventies and eighties, the mutual relationship frosty.
A picture books: Chancellor and Minister of the interior speaks in July 2018 in the German Bundestag
Since the controversy in the autumn of 2015, Merkel and Seehofer in a personal duration of the conflict through the years. Not only up to the Bundestag election in 2017, no, until the summer of 2018. The controversy surrounding the ceiling clouded the election campaign. And after the formation of the government in March 2018, the uglier’ll be relocated by the end of the dispute on the question of the foreclosure of the German border. Interior Minister Seehofer wants to be able to reject refugees at the border, his superior Merkel rejects this. In June 2018, the traditional group of the community of the CDU and the CSU in the Bundestag on for weeks on the Dump. Christian-Social and Christian Democrats, who are in the Parliament, together the Union’s group, will meet in Berlin to separate sessions. At the end there is a compromise.
Irritation by the Kremlin-visit
The counter-position to Merkel used Seehofer as a Bavarian father of the country until 2018. Traditionally, Bavaria’s Minister President occasionally run a “Auxiliary foreign policy”. The former Prime Minister of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber traveled, while Merkel was always distant towards Moscow, as well as Horst Seehofer, often to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Seehofer irritated with a plea for the lifting of sanctions against Russia, and assessments of the Ukraine crisis, the drop from the rate of the Federal government. Seehofer was also in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China. But the intensity of the relations Seehofer’s and the CSU to Hungary, Austria and the Balkan States was most remarkable. The more the heads of government in Budapest and Vienna, Viktor Orban, and Sebastian Briefly, with criticism of the Merkel’s open course of action in the refugee policy, the more cordial they were welcomed in Munich.
The leaders of the two parties with the “C” for “Christian” in the name are facing each other in an intimate distance as bitter. This alienation did not begin in the fall of 2015. Since the eighties, Seehofer of the most highly regarded social expert of the CSU in the Bundestag, and one of the best health policy-makers of the Union. Since 1998 he is a Vice-President of the Union, was most recently parliamentary leader, Friedrich Merz. After the 2002 Bundestag election, the lost, the Union, claimed Angela Merkel, the group of the top and replaced Merz. Seehofer remained one of the deputies.
As Seehofer due to Merkel, resigned
However, in the Wake of the Merkel-driven reorientation of the CDU, it came out in 2004, the split between group leader and group Vice. Merkel wanted more free market and less social protection. And she wanted to be stronger in the health policy, the statutory health insurance
Is the Minister of the environment Angela Merkel and Minister of health, Seehofer, 1995
as previously, the workers ‘ Fund and the employers relieve. Seehofer, however, introduced in the nineties for six years as a self-Federal Minister of health, always. And broke up with her. 22. November 2004 Seehofer resigned after a “big battle”, as it was called in the media, as a group Vice. He remained a simple member of the German Bundestag and Vice-Chairman of the CSU. “He is assigned because of his Conviction and it will not forget,” says one who accompanied him at the time.
Under Kohl
Therefore, it was surprising that Merkel, Seehofer included in your first Federal Cabinet in November 2005 and he followed this call. As the new Minister of agriculture. Three years later, he moved on and became the Prime Minister of Bavaria. Whether or not the two sat opposite each other ever at ease? After the election, in January 1991, they were together for the first time the Union group. In may 1992 they took as Federal Minister every week at the Cabinet table in the Chancellor’s office in Bonn square.
In the fourth Cabinet of Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel was an East German Climber from the beginning, the family Minister. In may 1992 Seehofer as Minister of health. Cabbage had stopped the East German Cabinet members, also of Merkel, the West German colleagues. Of the date between the CDU and the CSU-man nothing, unfortunately, is known.