The new color scheme a few months back was only a cosmetic step. Now, Germany's center-right Christian Democrats are going under the hood. For the first time since 2007, the party that ruled Germany for most of the republic's young history has revamped its party program.

Its leaders hope this is their ticket to returning to power, which they lost in 2021. In establishing what the CDU now stands for, the draft reflects ideological differences at the very top. Chairman Friedrich Merz needed three attempts to become party leader, rebuffed by a skeptical Angela Merkel when she was still chancellor and a powerful force in the party. With her gone and Merz in charge since early last year, he is seeking a different path.

It leads the CDU towards a more traditional, center-right landscape, reorienting the party on a range of issues, namely energy, immigration and paying particular attention to Germany's Muslim community. 

Merkel spent many of her almost 16 years in power in a "grand coalition" with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). In that period, political circles joked that she had "social democratized" the Christian Democrats. Under Merz, the CDU has repeatedly raked the Social Democrats over the coals.

Government crisis is opposition opportunity

"We would be ready if there are early elections," Carsten Linnemann, the CDU secretary general, told reporters on Monday.

Such a scenario is not unthinkable. Both the government coalition and its chancellor, the SPD's Olaf Scholz, face dismal polling prospects. The far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging to all-time highs. The economy appears sluggish, and a budget crisis remains without a clear solution. 

The CDU is positioning itself as the answer to Germany's woes. The draft envisions a return to nuclear power, which Germany has phased out, as part of the answer to reliable, affordable energy that complies with climate targets.

That claim is disputed by some economists, especially as renewable sources such as wind and solar have come down in price. Claudia Kemfert, who leads the Energy, Transportation and Environment Department at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), called the CDU program in this regard "regressive."

"Nuclear energy is a technology of the past, not the future. It is too expensive, the construction of the plants takes decades, the innovation potential is low and the risks are high," she told DW in a statement.  "Even the operators themselves no longer want it. Nuclear power is not competitive without high subsidies."

Gas-powered plants, which the CDU has also called for, need to be phased out by 2035, she added.

Curbing migration

The CDU would "put a stop to uncontrolled immigration and limit humanitarian migration to a level that does not overburden Germany's integration capacity," the draft reads.

The policy would shift the asylum process to third countries deemed safe, and settle applicants there. While CDU officials consider such changes a way to "uphold our humanitarian responsibilities," asylum advocates consider it a cynical effort to undermine the rule of law.

"Asylum procedures outside the EU disguise the desire to keep refugees at bay," Stephan Dünnwald, an advisor for the Bavarian Refugee Council, told DW in a statement.

He called the CDU's asylum position a "departure from the lessons learned by society and the international community after 1945."

It was a CDU-led government that permitted around one million, mostly-Muslim asylum seekers to enter Germany in 2015. That sense of openness, which Germany was widely praised for, was already getting dialed back with Merkel still in power. There is even less appetite for it now — not only from the CDU, but across much of the German political spectrum.

Islam's place in Germany

Gone are the days of recognizing that "Islam now belongs to Germany, too" as the CDU's Christian Wulff said when he served as Germany's president during an early Merkel government. The new draft manifesto adds a key caveat: Muslims belong to Germany so long as they "share our values."

Since the 1960s, Germany has been home to a substantial Muslim population — now more than five million people — yet structural hurdles have made establishing homegrown religious institutions difficult. That has contributed to a reliance on imams and Islamic education from abroad, feeding suspicions about "foreign influence" that the CDU wants to see stopped.

The shift to the right is partly an effort to win over supporters of the AfD, but critics see the risk of that strategy backfiring.

"Cheating off AfD schoolwork wasn't particularly smart," Aiman Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, told Stern magazine. "Experience shows that voters will ultimately go with the original."

The draft manifesto is only one piece of the CDU's pushback on migration and Germany's Muslim minority. It has used the attack by the Islamist Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel in October as the backdrop to legislative proposals that accelerate deportations and could deny or strip citizenship under certain circumstances. The European Union as well as the United States, Germany and several other countries classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The CDU's reservations on immigration come at a time when the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, has passed immigration reform that aims to boost the import of skilled labor at a time when economists and demographers have been ringing alarm bells about massive labor shortages in the near future. Merz's focus on Islamist and imported extremism misses what law enforcement regularly reports is a bigger threat: domestic white supremacist groups. 

A CDU that once campaigned on a "Germany in which you can live well and gladly" is now promising a better chance at "living in freedom," as the manifesto is titled. As a draft, the document is subject to change before party members vote on it next year. 

Merz himself has struggled with popularity, polls suggest, among the general public and within his own party.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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