Party in crisis: Hoppermann: CDU meeting is not a “miracle weapon”

Berlin. Before the start of the closed meeting of the CDU Presidium, General Secretary Franziska Hoppermann dampened expectations. The consultations are “not a silver bullet, but the beginning of a process that we are starting both in the federal government and government policy as well as in the party,” she told journalists. It’s about “finding our way back to our old strength and underpinning our claim as a people’s party.”

The CDU clearly noticed the warning signals from the three state elections in September, said Hoppermann. Now it's about regaining trust, not losing sight of the country's modernization and "addressing the reality of people's lives differently."

On September 20, the CDU was thrown out of a state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for the first time in its more than 80-year history. In Berlin that same evening she was pushed out of first place by the Left, which is now trying to form a government with the Greens and the SPD. In Saxony-Anhalt the party had lost almost 20 percentage points two weeks earlier. The AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund is now standing for election to the office of Prime Minister in December.

At the federal level, too, the Union has sunk to unprecedented depths. In several surveys, 17 months after the black-red federal government was sworn in, it is below 20 percent - compared to 28.5 percent in the election at the beginning of 2025. It was just six years ago that it reached around 40 percent in surveys.