Hendrik Wüst is the clear winner of the elections in NRW. The father of the family is an economist by his origin and socialization. But if you want to be successful in the NRW-CDU, you have to be social. With the help of Merkel’s most important sentence, Wüst has finally maneuvered himself into the middle of the party.
“We can do it.” In his government statement in connection with the Ukraine refugees in March 2022, Hendrik Wüst thought carefully about why he said this famous and most important of all Angela Merkel sentences. The reason is the history of the country There has never been a conservative prime minister in and of North Rhine-Westphalia, let alone a neoliberal, because what the first freely elected Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Karl Arnold, said about the industrial state was and will always be true: “North Rhine-Westphalia is the social conscience of the Republic.”
If you want to be successful in the CDU-NRW, you have to be social. Hendrik Wüst, however, is an economist based on his background and socialization. He’s also a hunter, and if you try to figure out how many socially active economists and hunters are, you’d end up with less than five percent. Hence the copied Merkel sentence. With the help of the refugee chancellor, Wüst maneuvered his way into the middle of the CDU.
It was an important prerequisite for his election victory in this federal state. Just as Daniel Günther had a very comparable orientation, which was an important prerequisite for his electoral success in Schleswig-Holstein two weeks ago. This is important for the alignment of the entire CDU under the leadership of Friedrich Merz. His most important promise was once to want to halve the AfD – with the help of conservative and neoliberal content. This is no longer the case.
And Wüst’s electoral success should encourage Friedrich Merz not to align the CDU as particularly conservative and business-friendly. But also economically competent, socially empathetic and climate-conscious. Just black and green.
Anyone who is prime minister in North Rhine-Westphalia must claim the right to become federal chancellor in order to be accepted in the state. That was the case for the record Prime Minister Johannes Rau, who in 1987 tried to become Chancellor as head of government in North Rhine-Westphalia – and failed because of Helmut Kohl. But it also applies to Hannelore Kraft, whose descent as head of government in North Rhine-Westphalia began the moment she announced that she would “never, never” move to Berlin.
However, it is not precisely the sheer size of this federal state that would like its top representatives to be suitable for chancellorship. But the lack of identity in this country, which consists of many tribes, on the one hand, combined with the pride of times long past as Germany’s industrial-political powerhouse, on the other.
Should Wüst become head of government in a black-green coalition, which his social democratic challenger Thomas Kutschaty could only dispute if the election results were distorted to the maximum, there would be a new player in the front row of the CDU.
Of course, the North Rhine-Westphalian state correspondents also know this. One of them asked Wüst on television about his chancellor ambitions, and Wüst answered in a meaningful, ambiguous way: “I would like to lead a government in the future as well.” Unfortunately, no one asked whether this could also happen in Berlin, which is not the case now belongs to North Rhine-Westphalia.
Wüst, who used to be of the “Haudrauf” type, which is why Jürgen Rüttgers once made him the – then hapless – CDU General Secretary, has long since become a prudent, maybe even cautious politician. He knows that in politics it can make more sense to passively avoid mistakes than to actively score points.
This is exactly what his predecessor had just failed to do. Armin Laschet’s flood of laughter in the presence of the Federal President ultimately cost the CDU candidate the chancellorship. Wüst took a close look at it and drew his conclusions from it.
One of his prudence is that Wüst is already preparing for a mud fight with his SPD challenger immediately after the election. Despite the worst result for the SPD since 1947, he unperturbedly laid claim to the office of prime minister – for example by forming a traffic light government based on the Berlin model.
Leading comrades encourage Kuchaty in this claim, such as the SPD general secretary Kevin Kühnert. A traffic light government in Düsseldorf would suit the comrades under pressure in Berlin. Incidentally, it would be the revival of an age-old social democratic election slogan: “Federal and state government, hand in hand.”
Wüst says two sentences about this. The first: He has a “clear mandate” to form a government – which is true: the CDU is by far the strongest force, it has even increased compared to its last election result at state level. The SPD, on the other hand, has continued to downsize – and a coalition with the election losers from the FDP and the clear election winners from the Greens would have something strangely asymmetrical.
Wüst’s second sentence against the unabashedly Machiavellian claims of the SPD: the election result must be acknowledged “with respect and decency”. “Respect” was the main campaign word of the later Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD). And as a precaution, “decency” condemns the illegitimate claim of the SPD as “indecent”.
Wüst is self-confident, pragmatic – and he knows where he comes from. He still lives in Rhede today, in a cozy and yet somewhat unadorned part of the Lower Rhine on the border to Münsterland. Whoever rides a bike with Wüst in order to have their homeland explained to them from this perspective, learns a lot about the structural change in the town, about companies that have gone under and those that have made it again with ingenuity and diligence.
In Rhede they were not pampered like in the Ruhr area, where either the state alleviated the need or the company patriarch – like Krupp, who was supposed to take care of his people – “from the cradle to the grave”. Wüst, the lanky mother-in-law type, took with him from his hometown to Düsseldorf that you have to make sure you get to the top yourself.
The down-to-earth man doesn’t go along with the vanities that are sometimes common there – Düsseldorf cultivates appearances as well as being. He’s a commoner, people like that don’t like ostentation. They tend to follow reason, see politics as the art of the possible rather than dreaming of what is desirable.
That is the most important prerequisite if the task now is to make the Greens a decent offer to go into government with him. Wüst gets along well with the top Green candidate, Mona Neubaur, a hands-on, fun-loving woman with a middle-class attitude. The “chemistry” between these two is right, and Wüst will certainly grant Neubaur their wish to become “the Habeck of Düsseldorf” – Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate and Deputy Prime Minister.
There is a lot at stake for Wüst. A career that could take the 46-year-old father of a small daughter very far, even to Berlin. Or career-off. Then he would be the head of government in North Rhine-Westphalia with the shortest term of office ever.
You can understand that he doesn’t feel like it.
