Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), its more openly right-wing Bavarian affiliate, announced the names of their ministers in the incoming federal government on Monday. In addition to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader who will head the government, the CDU/CSU will appoint a total of ten ministers and the Social Democrats (SPD) seven, including the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Labor. The SPD will only announce the names after the conclusion of the membership vote on the coalition agreement on Tuesday.
The nominations by the CDU and CSU show that the shift to the right that is taking place in the US under Donald Trump is not exceptional. The return to militarism, which forms the core of the incoming government’s program, also requires a sharp turn to the right in the spheres of domestic security, economic policy and culture. Although the CDU/CSU are currently still ruling out a coalition with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), they have adopted their positions on numerous issues.
Several nominees—including Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, Education Minister Karin Prien and Head of the Chancellery Thorsten Frei—can look back on a decades-long party career. They have completed the hard slog from the Junge Union, the CDU/CSU’s youth movement, through various party offices and mandates in local, state and federal government, and owe their appointment to their political proximity to Friedrich Merz.
The incoming Chancellor, who sat on the supervisory boards of numerous banks and large corporations before returning to politics, and headed the German subsidiary of the world’s largest investment company BlackRock, has also brought two ministers directly from the leadership of large corporations into the government—which is unusual in German politics. As in the US, where multi-billionaire Elon Musk is one of the president’s closest advisers, the financial oligarchy and state power are drawing closer together.
The so-called workers’ wing of the CDU, the Christian Democratic Employees’ Union (CDA), on the other hand, has come away empty-handed for the first time under a CDU chancellor, which it bitterly lamented. CDA leader Dennis Radtke called the cabinet selection “disconcerting and wrong.” There has never been a CDU-led federal government without CDA participation, from Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war chancellor, to Angela Merkel.
Karsten Wildberger, CEO of Ceconomy, which owns the electronics chains Mediamarkt and Saturn, will head the newly created Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization. In the last financial year, his company generated sales of €22.4 billion in over a thousand stores with 50,000 employees. Wildberger restructured the ailing group by saving €130 million in administration, among other things.
Wildberger is not a member of the CDU, but has been a member of the CDU Economic Council for several years. He can look back on a long career on the boards of various consulting, energy and telecommunications companies, including Boston Consulting, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Australia’s Telstra. He has spent a large part of his career abroad.
Katherina Reiche, head of the E.ON subsidiary Westenergie AG since 2020, will become Minister of Economic Affairs. In contrast to Wildberger, Reiche has enjoyed a political career. She was a member of the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) and State Secretary before moving into the private sector.
Interior Minister Dobrindt adopts the far-right AfD’s line
The Ministry of the Interior will be headed by CSU politician Alexander Dobrindt. With 2,100 ministry staff and 85,000 employees in subordinate authorities, including around 50,000 in the Federal Police, it is at the heart of the strengthening of the state apparatus and attacks on migrants approved in the coalition agreement.
The previous minister, Nancy Faeser (SPD), already played a key role in sealing off the European and German borders and abandoning tens of thousands of refugees to inhumane conditions or death. The apparatus of state surveillance and repression was massively expanded under her direction. Dobrindt provides a guarantee that this policy will be continued and intensified.
A member of the Junge Union and the CSU for 39 years, Dobrindt has left behind a trail of favoritism, corruption and right-wing demagoguery. As transport minister (2013-2017) under Angela Merkel, he helped to cover up the VW diesel scandal and campaigned for the introduction of a road toll for foreigners, which the CSU used to stir up chauvinist sentiment. Introduced by his successor Andreas Scheuer, the “foreigner toll” was ultimately declared illegal by the European Court of Justice, costing the state coffers €243 million in compensation payments.
Dobrindt denounced the Greens as a “chaotic party of stone-throwers” and called for the Left Party to be banned. In 2018, he campaigned in Die Welt for a “conservative revolution,” a term that goes back to the far right in the Weimar Republic. In the style of the AfD, he propagated the “defense of our Christian-Western dominant culture,” described “homeland and fatherland” as the “roots of our identity,” praised the “national feeling” as a “gift for our country” and called for the demarcation of “our community of values” from “other world views.”
Last summer, Dobrindt advocated sending war refugees back to Ukraine. And after Trump came to power in January, he praised his rule by decree as an example of how rapid change was also possible in Germany if the politicians in charge were willing to pursue it.
Johann Wadephul is the first CDU member to become German Foreign Minister in 59 years. Since 1966, the SPD, the Free Democrats or the Greens have always held the foreign ministry. Wadephul, who joined the CDU in 1982, is regarded as a loyal follower of Merz and will ensure that the government remains fully committed to the war against Russia and its support for the genocide in Gaza.
In contrast to his predecessor Annalena Baerbock (Greens), Wadephul refrains from human rights rhetoric and openly expresses the imperialist aims of German foreign policy. He has accused the incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz of strengthening Russian President Vladimir Putin by publicly naming “red lines”—such as the non-delivery of Taurus missiles. All options must be “on the table” and Russia must “not be told in advance what Germany will or will not do,” he told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. “We must not hesitate another second. All the procrastination of recent years, all the withholding of material, has only encouraged Putin in the end.”
Education Minister Karin Prien, who has held the same office at the state level in Schleswig-Holstein since 2017, became known nationwide for her attacks on students protesting against the policy of mass infection during the coronavirus pandemic. She has been a member of the CDU since 1981.
In February 2022, she caused a nationwide storm of outrage when she commented on the deaths of COVID-infected children on Twitter with the words: “Please differentiate: Children are dying. This is extremely tragic. But they die with COVID-19 and only extremely rarely because of COVID-19.”
Wolfram Weimer: an ultra-right figure responsible for the Ministry of Culture
The character of the future government can be seen most clearly in the appointment of Wolfram Weimer as the individual responsible for culture. Weimer does not hold a ministerial portfolio, but only the office of State Secretary. However, as many state subsidies pass over his desk and the State Minister for Culture also plays a prominent role in the public eye, he exerts a strong influence.
Weimer’s predecessor, the Green Party’s Claudia Roth, has already shifted cultural policy far to the right. The former manager of the political rock band “Ton Steine Scherben” played an exemplary role in the rightward development of the former environmental party. She denounced the most important international exhibition of contemporary art, the Kassel Documenta, as “anti-Semitic” and threatened to withdraw funding. She also attacked the rock musician Roger Waters and the Berlinale film festival for defending the Palestinians against Israeli genocide.
With Weimer, an openly right-wing ideologue is now assuming responsibility for cultural policy. The 60-year-old publicist has previously worked mainly for conservative and right-wing media outlets. He has not distinguished himself with his cultural knowledge and interests.
In the 1990s, he worked as business editor and foreign correspondent for the F.A.Z., then moved to Springer and became editor-in-chief of Die Welt and the Berliner Morgenpost. In 2002, he developed the right-wing magazine Cicero for the Swiss publisher Ringier, which he ran until 2010. He then briefly headed Focus magazine before finally founding his own right-wing conservative publishing house.
He is now so far to the right that even F.A.Z. editor Jürgen Kaube describes him as “the wrong man in the wrong place, to put it mildly.” Yet Kaube himself is an out-and-out right-winger. For example, he defended the extreme right-wing historian Jörg Baberowski (“Hitler was not vicious”) in the F.A.Z. against criticism from the Socialist Equality Party.
Kaube referred to a “Conservative Manifesto” that Weimer published in 2018. In it, according to Kaube, he complained “about the ‘amoral Renaissance’—he means the era of Sandro Botticelli, Albrecht Dürer, Titian and Shakespeare,” worries “demographically about the ‘perpetuation of one’s own blood’ and the ‘biological self-surrender’ of Europe,” and mourns “the colonial era with the regrettable formulation that Europe no longer has ‘the power to expand’.”
In his “Conservative Manifesto,” Weimer lists “ten commandments of the new bourgeoisie,” including “live in your homeland,” “honor your nation,” “cherish tradition,” “respect law and order” and “respect God.” In other words, he is a bigoted, volkish-nationalist right-winger.
The fact that the SPD is participating in this right-wing government proves that nothing connects the former workers’ party with the interests of the general population and young people. While the CDU and CSU take responsibility for strengthening state repression at home, an aggressive foreign policy and the cultural shift to the right, the SPD will focus on rearmament and social cuts.
It is considered fairly certain that Defense Minister Boris Pistorius will be the only one to retain his office and continue to concentrate on rearmament. According to the latest report by the Stockholm-based peace research institute Sipri, German military spending rose by 28 percent to $88.5 billion (€77.6 billion) last year alone. This puts Germany in fourth place worldwide behind the US, China and Russia.
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil will in all likelihood take over the Ministry of Finance. He will have the task of covering the exploding military budget and the consequences of the international trade war by cutting spending on pensions, social welfare and healthcare.
Klingbeil is also a militarist. The son of a professional soldier, he grew up at the Munster army base in the shadow of barracks, tanks and fighter planes and today, after a youthful period of protest, is once again fully committed to arming the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces).