The fallout in Germany continues from the CDU's election setback last Sunday. In the bellweather region of Hessen, the CDU lost 12 points from the last contest five years before.
Only two months before, I was at the CDU's conference in Hannover, and the mood (picture opposite) was one of great optimism - Chancellor Angela Merkel was rising in popularity, the party machine in Hessen was working well, and the opposition SPD was divided and unsure of its future direction.
The turnaround was almost as great as that seen in our politics between September and October. So what happened to the CDU?
The CDU's Prime Minister of Hessen, Roland Koch, decided to run a controversial campaign linking immigration and youth crime. He railed against "criminal young foreigners". Koch said:
"We have spent too long showing a strange sociological understanding for groups that consciously commit violence as ethnic minorities. People who live in Germany must behave properly and refrain from using their fists. That's how one behaves in a civilized country."
We in the Conservatives have come to learn that whilst immigration can and indeed must be debated in mainstream politics, it is vitally important to get the language right. Kock seemed to be saying that entire minority populations were prone to violence. David Cameron in particular has been very careful and rightly won plaudits for his more considered approach.
The CDU has been clumsy. This is not a new phenomenon, either. In 2000 one senior CDU politician called for better computer training for German children, so there would be less need for IT professionals from countries like India. Fair enough to me, but somehow the title of the campaign became "Kinder statt Inder" (children, not Indians), and the slogan was adopted by the German Far Right party, and the campaign ended badly for the CDU.
Chancellor Merkel is more careful, but every now and then, she says something surprising. At the CDU Conference, she said that "the minarets of the mosques should not be higher than the steeples of the churches".
The issue of integration for the CDU is like Europe was for us in the 1990s - a source of constant division. Every now and then, internal peace is reached, only for it to be blown apart as Koch has done. To read more, see this useful essay in Der Spiegel, albeit from a leftish standpoint.
This week, the Conservatives and the CDU launched joint working parties. I am delighted to be chairing the one on economic competitiveness, where we have much to learn from Germany (and they from us), but I shall also be keeping a close eye on the one on security and integration, where I think the ideas traffic will be very much in the other direction.
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