Hendrik Wüst: Certainties are also dwindling in the West

The scenario that they fear in the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia these days goes something like this:

Easter 2027: The state election campaign is entering the decisive phase. And in the Rhineland and Westphalia, the party's election campaigners are encountering the same disappointment, the same annoyance, the same anger everywhere. What's going on in Berlin again? When will the reforms come? Why is fuel becoming more expensive again? Who else should take this chancellor seriously?

And the volunteers at the front doors and in the pedestrian zones only have a tight-lipped answer: “But Hendrik…”

But Hendrik, our Hendrik, our Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst does his job much better than those in Berlin. That should be the sound with which the CDU goes into the election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia. Until recently, they in Düsseldorf thought that this strategy would at least be able to withstand the headwinds from federal politics. However, this hope is fading.

At the end of September, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger published a new survey by the opinion research institute forsa. The CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia has 29 percent, if there would be a state election next Sunday. That's three percentage points less than in April - and only seven ahead of the AfD, which gained two percentage points. This is new for Wüst and his party. After all, the CDU-NRW has never been below 30 percent in surveys since its election victory in 2022.

And yet they could probably cope with these numbers better if the polls hadn't asked the Sunday question about the federal election in the same survey. Accordingly, the CDU in the Chancellor's home country currently has 22 percent. The strongest force there would also be the AfD, which Forsa sees at 24 percent.

Never before has the AfD been ahead in a survey in North Rhine-Westphalia

This is just a survey for now. But for the most populous federal state it represents a turning point. And for the CDU it is a setback. The AfD has never been ahead in North Rhine-Westphalia. So even Wüst, who has ruled relatively quietly with the Greens for almost five years and is already being tipped to be the next chancellor, has to be afraid of the AfD.

In any case, the federal party's crisis cannot be covered up with a few nice wild posters. This realization is slowly percolating in the West. As soon as the debate about a move to Berlin has died down, the Christian Democrats here are worried about their hopeful man. If Wüst wins the election next April narrowly and with significant losses – he would be in trouble. At least. Perhaps even burned as a possible successor to Friedrich Merz.

Anyone who asks state party officials these days will encounter a strange mixture of nervousness and Rhenish fatalism. It would still have been nice.

We went into the summer break somewhat satisfied, says someone who is well connected in all branches of the state party. "But then something went wrong." How Jens Spahn communicated his paternity via a surrogate mother also caused people to leave the party in North Rhine-Westphalia. How the Chancellor then wanted to reorganize his cabinet was not particularly helpful in smoothing things over. And the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin hadn't even taken place yet.

“Of course the mood is bad,” says Kevin Gniosdorz, ​​state leader of the Junge Union. "After three lost state elections and falling poll numbers, anything else would be strange." Others put it even more drastically. He doesn't know, said an official who has been there for a long time, "whether the mood is still measurably at zero or already below that."

Even deep in the West, old certainties are shaky. The democratic center will also be able to form a government after the 2027 election. But it is no longer beyond imagination that the AfD could be the strongest faction. But you don't want to let a survey drive you too crazy yet. After all, Wüst is universally popular, it is said, and the party is still six to ten percentage points above the national trend.

The particularly relaxed ones sit in the state parliament. What can easily be explained by the fact that, even among Christian Democrats, before an election, the following applies: everyone is their own neighbor. And from the perspective of a CDU MP, the situation is not as complicated as it seems. Anyone who wants to be part of the group again in the future must win the constituency. That was the case in 2022, when the state list did not move. And this also applies to 2027 as a realistic scenario.

The simple CDU MP is not afraid that someone at home could pose a threat to him. The AfD strongholds are believed to be where the party has already done particularly well in the 2025 local elections, for example in Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg or the Ennepe-Ruhr district. What these cities and regions have in common is that they are represented in the state parliament by the SPD.

“There are no naysayers in the parliamentary group,” says a long-serving CDU MP. He also attributes this to good management of expectations from above. When the polls were at more than 40 percent less than two years ago, Wüst curbed the euphoria in internal meetings. Nobody should be blinded by this.

The look goes back to Lower Saxony

At the party headquarters in Düsseldorf, they are counting on the past few weeks to act as a warning shot. That everyone recognizes the seriousness of the situation - and goes into the election campaign all the more motivated. This confidence is based on our own recent experiences and the history of the neighboring state of Lower Saxony.

In the 2017 election campaign, for example, Armin Laschet was well behind the SPD and then Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft in surveys just a few weeks before the election. In the end he narrowly won; it was enough for a coalition with the FDP. Six months before the 2022 election, Wüst was an unknown ex-state minister, just newly appointed Prime Minister, with poll numbers well below 30 percent. He won with 35.7 percent.

The CDU-NRW has learned from both experiences: don't panic. The announcement that Wüst is now making to his people internally is correspondingly clear: Just keep governing, please.

And yet JU regional leader Gniosdorz sends a warning to Berlin: “Something must finally succeed there that people notice in everyday life.” Anyone who talks about justice should not forget the young generation. "Doing nothing is the most unfair of all options because it only pushes the burden backwards."

Unlike Friedrich Merz in Berlin, Wüst in North Rhine-Westphalia has a CDU politician in his cabinet who many people actually associate with a credible stance on questions of justice. Social Affairs Minister Karl-Josef Lauman was head of the party's workers' wing for many years. Together with Interior Minister Herbert Reul, the popular "black sheriff", he forms the last real wing of the once broad-based CDU people's party. With strong local candidates you can win elections even against the bad national trend. They also drew this conclusion in Düsseldorf from the local elections in Lower Saxony a few weeks ago.

But there is another election in the neighboring federal state, the special feature of which is now being pointed out casually in conversations: In the spring of 1998, then Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder (SPD) declared the state election in Lower Saxony to be a “referendum on the candidate for chancellor”. He got 48 percent. Perhaps, they hope in the CDU, a similar effect could save Wüst from excessive losses: if only the people in North Rhine-Westphalia want to recommend him for higher tasks with proper support.