Every day from somewhere a Union member aims with a point at the incumbent CDU leader.
(Photo: Reuters)
If you still needed proof that morality is a blunt weapon in the struggle for power, you just have to watch the drama of the CDU and CSU these days, no of the past few months. Not a day goes by when politicians from the CDU and above all the CSU do not try to wear down party leader Armin Laschet and bring him to the point that he throws himself down in exasperation.
Nobody will want it to be then. Who wants to serve for a stab in the back legend, everyone knows that the grip of power is barred for the murderer. So much morality has to be there after all.
Everyone should get out their Machiavelli one more time and read what happened to a Prince Laschet who had to fight a Prince Markus Söder of Bavaria and a Prince Jens Spahn from the Münsterland, who in turn knew loyal snipers by their side. “A clever prince,” wrote the political theorist at the end of the 15th century, “must never keep his promises if it is harmful to him.” After all, princes only became powerful if they “took it easy with good faith and understood how to deceive and deceive others”. Incidentally, this also applied to Charlemagne, who resided in Laschet’s home town of Aachen.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet succeeded in engaging opponents in power as a mediator. This plan does not seem to work in Berlin. His systematically dwindling authority is apparently no longer sufficient to enforce discipline within his own ranks.
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His delegation may have shown itself to be disciplined and committed in the talks with the FDP. Nobody tapped their cell phone or looked bored at the air. And yet: in the aftermath, his enemies again used their direct line to the newspaper with the four letters to make confidential information public and thus to anger the benevolent liberals and to incite the SPD and the Greens to ridicule and malice.
Delusion and selfishness
This is how decomposition works, while in public each of these dishonest power-hungry people feigns the five virtues of Machiavelli: goodness, honesty, loyalty, courtesy and piety.
They are like that and they also shout loudly: “First the country, then the party” and mean themselves. So that it doesn’t sound selfish, some bring up the discussion about including membership. There is as little to think about that as Machiavelli believed in the good in people. In the struggle for power, he knew that “those who honestly obeyed their commitments got off badly in the end.”
As he put it so beautifully: “The mob only sticks to appearances and judges things only according to their success.” But the Union will suffer from the consequences of its actions for a long time if it ends up in the opposition.
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