“The angler liked the bait, not the fish”

Hamburg's CDU leader Christoph Ploß has written a book in which the 37-year-old describes an "agenda of bourgeois reason" on 184 pages, as he puts it in the subtitle. It is an attempt to find answers to the question of what politics for mainstream society could look like. Ploß drafts this policy by showing how the pension system would have to be reformed in order to relieve future generations, or what would be necessary to bring groups in the population that are drifting apart closer together again.

The term “political center”, which has meanwhile been used in an inflationary manner, should not just be an empty phrase or serve a “bubble in Berlin-Mitte” that “has nothing in common with life in many other parts of Germany”, writes Ploß. In order to get more people enthusiastic about middle-class politics, a “convincing narrative and a positive agenda” are needed.

It's not surprising, but it's a cleverly written book. It contains many (well-known) positions of the CDU, ranging from the demand for an extension of the lifetime of Germany's nuclear power plants to the warning that Germany urgently needs to remove bureaucratic obstacles. Sometimes Ploß even pulls out much older demands, such as those for an extension of the legislative periods in the Bundestag (a major topic for the Christian Democrats in the mid-2010s).

Nevertheless, he manages to tie it specifically to the current events of the past months and years. The demand for an extension of the legislature, for example, goes hand in hand with the consideration of limiting the terms of office of the chancellor. According to Ploss, two periods would be the maximum. “Should Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel have stayed in office for 16 years?” he asks critically. While Angela Merkel initiated reforms to secure the social security system at the beginning of her chancellorship, "in spite of all the merits, in the end there was not much of it left".

In general, the book has strengths where Ploß quarrels with his own party and its decisions of the past years. At the beginning - and again and again during the course of the book - Ploß takes a hard stance on the CDU. The defeat in the federal elections in September 2021 was homemade.

For years, the party's most prominent personalities could be found "sometimes on the substitutes' bench or in the stands, but not on the field or in the federal cabinet". Ploß, who openly supported Friedrich Merz, writes about the election of Laschet as candidate for chancellor that it was a “capital blunder” to do it purely according to internal logic. "The angler liked the bait, but unfortunately not the fish."

Ploß sees another major mistake by his party in allowing the public perception to become less and less clear as to what Christian Democracy still stands for. Too many politicians - in the CSU and CDU, but here he broadens his view to include federal politics as a whole - would only have concentrated on adapting their goals to the supposed wishes of the voters.

Ploß is calling for a rethink here: politics shouldn't be about taking the path of least resistance or getting through an election period as comfortably as possible. "Every responsible politician must be concerned with really making things better, tackling problems and standing up for their beliefs and values."

And presumably that is exactly what Ploß is about in his book. He wants to make it clear what he stands for as a type of politician. Anyone who knows the member of the Bundestag mainly from the media will perhaps primarily have the image of the sometimes too smooth youth in mind, who likes to polarize with his positions and jump over every little media stick. However, if you meet the 37-year-old without a microphone, you can experience an open and seriously interested conversation partner who explains his ideas about politics with great patience.

The book is an attempt to convert these conversations into printed words. This is considered good manners in certain political circles today, if he or she wants to position themselves for higher things in their own party and in federal politics. This is particularly evident in the book in the chapters on new paths in German foreign policy and on paths to a changed migration policy. Ploß did his doctorate on the development of Europe and sits on the Bundestag committee for European affairs. So far, however, he has been noticed more for other topics from more general federal politics. His book could change that.

However, Ploß cannot completely abandon the topics that have brought him fame up to now. For example, he works on almost exactly 30 pages of gender asterisks and other language elements that are propagated as politically correct, such as those that “Green politicians” like to use. "I think we need more political courage, especially when it comes to issues like this," writes Ploß.

Ploß makes it clear that anyone can speak privately as they wish. "But if a language police force emerges that wants to impose its often spelling and grammatical errors on others in state institutions without any basis or legitimacy, then all the alarm bells should ring in the middle class."

It's a position he's held for a long time, but reading his book gives you a better sense that his concern is more than a populist issue. He explains why he sees potential in gender asterisks or colons to divide society.

A majority of Germans are against gendering, according to Ploß, who - like many of his theses - proves this with data from surveys or studies. When gender is now forced on them by politics, they feel they are being treated from above, not taken seriously and belittled. Last but not least, this shatters the relationship to politics, which is perceived as part of a moral avant-garde that no longer cares about the majority of the population.

The wrong way, Ploß believes. After all, a good politician is characterized by the fact that he can put himself in other people's shoes, that he listens and does not just speak for his group. "So I not only feel an obligation to white, heterosexual men from northern Germany between the ages of 30 and 40, but also to pensioners or young students with a migration background, trade unionists as well as medium-sized entrepreneurs."

It is such sentences that party friends and CDU sympathizers should be happy about in Ploß' book. He allows the Christian Democrats to dream of “Germany's awakening” under their rule. But sometimes the politician makes it very easy for himself, for example when he writes about energy and climate policy and intersperses sentences about his "goals".

He wants to promote the topic of climate protection with a "positive vision of the future", he writes in one chapter - "a vision of the future that creates jobs, develops export hits, that saves CO2 through innovations and not through bans and brings joy to the future and progress in climate protection." backed this up with concrete proposals, such as greater support for Germany for the Iter research reactor, in which energy is to be generated through the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms. But he doesn't have to worry about having to translate his diverse ideas into concrete actions in the coming years.

Incidentally, the book, in which Ploß was supported by former WELT journalist Ansgar Graw, ends with the words that if there is a renaissance in bourgeois politics, "then the best is yet to come!" words of his book will be measured.