Christian Democratic Union of Germany
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It is the major party of the centre-right in German politics. Friedrich Merz has been federal chairman of the CDU since 31 January 2022, and has served as the Chancellor of Germany since 6 May 2025.
The CDU is the largest party in the Bundestag, the German federal legislature, with 208 out of 630 seats, having won 28.5% of votes in the 2025 federal election. It forms the CDU/CSU Bundestag faction, also known as the Union, with its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. The group's parliamentary leader has been Jens Spahn since 5 May 2025.
Founded in 1945 as an interdenominational Christian party, the CDU effectively succeeded the pre-Nazi era Catholic Centre Party, with many former members joining the party, including its first leader Konrad Adenauer. The party also included politicians of other backgrounds, including liberals and conservatives. As a result, the party claims to represent "Christian-social, liberal and conservative" elements. The CDU is generally pro-European in outlook. Black is the party's customary and historical electoral colour. Other colours include red for the logo, orange for the flag, and black-red-gold for the corporate design.
The CDU leads the federal government in a grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, after returning as the largest party in the 2025 federal election. It previously led the federal government from 1949 to 1969, 1982 to 1998, and 2005 to 2021. Germany's three longest-serving post-war Chancellors have all come from the CDU, specifically: Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel, and Konrad Adenauer. The party also currently leads the governments of seven of Germany's sixteen states.
The CDU is a member of the Centrist Democrat International, the International Democracy Union, and the European People's Party. It is the largest party in the EPP with 23 MEPs. Ursula von der Leyen, the current President of the European Commission, is also a member of the CDU.
History
Founding period
Immediately following the end of World War II and the foreign occupation of Germany, simultaneous yet unrelated meetings began occurring throughout the country, each with the intention of planning a Christian-democratic party. Consequently, the CDU was established in Berlin on 26 June 1945 and in Rheinland and Westfalen in September of the same year.The founding members of the CDU consisted primarily of former members of the Centre Party, the German Democratic Party, the German National People's Party, and the German People's Party. In the Cold War, years after World War II up to the 1960s, the CDU attracted conservative, anti-communist, former Nazis as well as Nazi collaborators into its higher ranks. A prominent member was theologian Eugen Gerstenmaier, who became Acting Chairman of the Foreign Board.
The result of these meetings was the establishment of an inter-confessional party influenced heavily by the political tradition of liberal conservatism. The CDU experienced considerable success gaining widespread support from the time of its creation in Berlin on 26 June 1945 until its first convention on 21 October 1950, at which future West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was named the first Chairman of the party.
Adenauer era (1949–1963)
In the beginning, it was not clear which party would be favored by the victors of World War II, but by the end of the 1940s the governments of the United States and of the United Kingdom began to lean more toward the CDU and significantly away from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, especially due to geopolitical reasons. The latter was more nationalist and sought German reunification even at the expense of concessions to the Soviet Union, depicting Adenauer as an instrument of both the Americans and the Vatican. The Western powers appreciated the CDU's right-ward slant, its commitment to capitalism, and its value as a pivotal oppositional force to the communists, thereby keeping consistent with US/UK foreign policy. In addition, Adenauer was also trusted by the British.However, the party was split over issues of rearmament within the Western alliance and German unification as a neutral state. Adenauer staunchly defended his pro-Western position and outmaneuvered some of his opponents. He also refused to consider the SPD as a party of the coalition until he felt sure that they shared his anti-communist position. The principled rejection of a reunification that would alienate Germany from the Western alliance made it harder to attract Protestant voters to the party, as most refugees from the former German territories east of the Oder river were of that faith, as were the majority of the inhabitants of East Germany.
Therefore, the CDU was the dominant political party for the first two decades following the establishment of West Germany in 1949. The durable alliance that the party had established with the liberal Free Democratic Party as the leading tandem of several federal governments, and, implicitly, the strong partnership between Chancellor Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss enabled West Germany to thoroughly rebuild itself in the wake of World War II. Adenauer remained the party's leader until 1963, when former Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard replaced him. As the Free Democratic Party withdrew from the governing coalition in 1966 due to disagreements over fiscal and economic policy, Erhard was forced to resign. Consequently, a grand coalition with the SPD took over government under CDU Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger.
Opposition against social-liberal governments (1969–1982)
The SPD quickly gained popularity and succeeded in forming a social-liberal coalition with the FDP following the 1969 federal election, forcing the CDU out of power for the first time in its history. The CDU and CSU were highly critical of Chancellor Willy Brandt's "change through rapprochement" policy towards the Eastern bloc and protested sharply against the 1970 treaties of Moscow and Warsaw that renounced claims to the former eastern territories of Germany and recognised the Oder–Neisse line as Germany's eastern border. The Union parties had close ties with the Heimatvertriebene associations who hoped for a return of or in these territories. Seven Bundestag members, including former vice chancellor Erich Mende, defected from the FDP and SPD to the CDU in protest against these treaties, depriving Brandt of his majority, and providing a thin majority for the CDU and CSU. In April 1972, the CDU saw its chance to return to power, calling a constructive vote of no confidence. CDU chairman Rainer Barzel was almost certain to become the new Chancellor. But not all parliamentarians voted as expected : Brandt won the vote and stayed in office. Thus, the CDU continued its role as opposition for a total of thirteen years. In 1982, the FDP withdrew from the coalition with the SPD and allowed the CDU to regain power.Kohl era (1982–1998)
CDU Chairman Helmut Kohl became the new Chancellor of West Germany and his CDU/CSU–FDP coalition was confirmed in the 1983 federal election.After the collapse of the East German government in 1989, Kohl—supported by the governments of the United States and reluctantly by those of France and the United Kingdom—called for German reunification. On 3 October 1990, the government of East Germany was abolished and its territory acceded to the territory of the Basic Law already in place in West Germany. The East German CDU merged with its West German counterpart and elections were held for the reunified country. Public support for the coalition's work in the process of German reunification was reiterated in the 1990 federal election in which the CDU–FDP governing coalition experienced a clear victory. Although Kohl was re-elected, the party began losing much of its popularity because of an economic recession in the former GDR and increased taxes in the west. The CDU was nonetheless able to win the 1994 federal election by a narrow margin thanks to an economic recovery.
Kohl served as chairman until the party's electoral defeat in 1998, when he was succeeded by Wolfgang Schäuble. In the 1998 federal election, the CDU polled 28.4% and the CSU 6.7% of the national vote, the lowest result for those parties since 1949; a red–green coalition under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder took power until 2005.
Merkel era (2000–2018)
Schäuble resigned in early 2000 as a result of a party financing scandal and was replaced by Angela Merkel, the first woman and the first person from East Germany to lead the federal party. She remained the leader of the CDU for more than eighteen years. In the 2002 federal election, Merkel ceded the position of CDU/CSU's joint candidate for the chancellor's office to the leader of the sister party, Bavarian minister-president Edmund Stoiber. CDU and CSU polled slightly higher, but still lacked the majority needed for a CDU–FDP coalition government and stayed in opposition.In 2005, early elections were called after the CDU dealt the governing SPD a major blow, winning more than ten state elections, most of which were landslide victories. The resulting grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD faced a serious challenge stemming from both parties' demand for the chancellorship. After three weeks of negotiations, the two parties reached a deal whereby CDU received the chancellorship while the SPD retained 8 of the 16 seats in the cabinet and a majority of the most prestigious cabinet posts. The coalition deal was approved by both parties at party conferences on 14 November. Merkel was confirmed as the first female Chancellor of Germany by the majority of delegates in the newly assembled Bundestag on 22 November. Since her first term in office, from 2005 to 2009, there have been discussions if the CDU was still "sufficiently conservative" or if it was "social-democratising". In March 2009, Merkel answered with the statement "Sometimes I am liberal, sometimes I am conservative, sometimes I am Christian-social—and this is what defines the CDU."
Although the CDU/CSU lost support in the 2009 federal elections, their "desired partner" the FDP experienced the best election cycle in its history, thereby enabling a CDU/CSU–FDP coalition. This marked the first change of coalition partner by a Chancellor in German history and the first centre-right coalition government since 1998. CDU candidate Christian Wulff won the 2010 presidential election in the third ballot, while opposition candidate Joachim Gauck received a number of "faithless" votes from the government camp.
The decisions to suspend conscription and to phase out nuclear energy broke with long-term principles of the CDU, moving the party into a more socially liberal direction and alienating some of its more conservative members and voters. At its November 2011 conference the party proposed a "wage floor", after having expressly rejected minimum wages during the previous years. Psephologist and Merkel advisor Matthias Jung coined the term "asymmetric demobilisation" for the CDU's strategy of adopting issues and positions close to its rivals, e.g. regarding social justice and ecology, thus avoiding conflicts that might mobilise their potential supporters. Some of the promises in the CDU's 2013 election platform were seen as "overtaking the SPD on the left". While this strategy proved to be quite successful in elections, it also raised warnings that the CDU's profile would become "random", the party would lose its "essence" and it might even be dangerous for democracy in general if parties became indistinguishable and voters demotivated.
President Wulff resigned in February 2012 due to allegations of corruption, triggering an early presidential election. This time the CDU supported, reluctantly, nonpartisan candidate Joachim Gauck. The CDU/CSU–FDP coalition lasted until the 2013 federal election, when the FDP lost all its seats in the Bundestag while the CDU and CSU won their best result since 1990, only a few seats short of an absolute majority. This was partly due to the CDU's expansion of voter base to all socio-structural groups, partly due to the personal popularity of Chancellor Merkel. After talks with the Greens had failed, the CDU/CSU formed a new grand coalition with the SPD.
Despite their long-cherished slogan of "There must be no democratically legitimised party to the right of CDU/CSU", the Union has had a serious competitor to its right since 2013. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany was founded with the involvement of disgruntled CDU members. It drew on the discontent of some conservatives with the Merkel administration's handling of the European debt crisis and later the 2015 refugee crisis, lamenting a purported loss of sovereignty and control or even "state failure". Nearly 10 percent of early AfD members were defectors from the CDU.
In 2017, the Bundestag voted to legalise same-sex marriage. Merkel had allowed the conscience vote to happen despite her personal objections. While she herself and the majority of the party's representatives voted against the proposal, a number of CDU deputies supported it. In the 2017 election, the CDU and CSU lost a large portion of their vote share: With 26.8 percent of party list votes, the CDU received its worst result since 1949, losing more than fifty seats in the Bundestag. After failing to negotiate a coalition with the FDP and Greens, they continued their grand coalition with the SPD. In October 2018, Merkel announced that she would step down as leader of the CDU that December and not seek reelection, but wanted to remain as Chancellor until 2021.