CDU: China check + Data Protection Act + Sinovac + Decoupling + VW + WHO mission

CDU: the China candidate check

When it comes to the CDU’s attitude toward China, observers of the ruling party like to speak of the eternal yin and yang, a perpetual struggle between rejection and dissociation from the authoritarian state power in Beijing, on the one hand, and the will to cooperate with the emerging economic power, on the other.

People like to remember November 2019, when the CDU met for the Leipzig party conference. The public focus at the time was the Huawei question: Should Germany go along with the American demand and exclude the Chinese network supplier from the construction of the 5G network? “All providers under the influence of undemocratic states should be excluded,” was the core sentence of a motion by the implacable party around foreign policy expert Norbert Roettgen, which was supposed to decide the China issue once and for all and almost led to a severe clash between the domestic and human rights policy wing of the party and the economic policy experts – and even to a rift with the party’s own chancellor. In the end, partly due to the active intervention of Angela Merkel, who feared such a ban, the delegates finally agreed on a watered-down formula that would not mean an exclusion of the Chinese but a demand for compliance with a safety catalog for all those who want to help build the 5G network. This could be called a pragmatic compromise. For many in the CDU, however, it felt more like a band-aid, a makeshift seal over an open wound. The conflict persists to this day. And if Friedrich Merz is to be believed (“The relationship with China is the top transatlantic issue.”), then, in the coming years, the CDU will have to deal even more intensively with the question: What to do about China?

Roettgen: too much consideration for economic interests

If Norbert Roettgen heads the CDU and is then possibly the CDU/CSU’s candidate for chancellor, inner-party economic policymakers can brace themselves for tougher times ahead. “Germany must understand that China is more than just a big marketplace,“ foreign policy expert Roettgen tweeted recently, making no secret of the fact that he thinks the CAI concluded between China and the EU shortly before US President Joe Biden took office is a mistake. Because it is “inconceivable” to him that the EU would conclude a treaty implicitly accepting forced labor in China. But above all, because he is counting on a revival of the Europeans’ transatlantic relationship with the Americans and sees the conclusion of the agreement shortly before Biden’s inauguration as a disruptive factor.