German bishops urge firm leadership after CDU election victory

With an 82 per cent voter turnout, the CDU advanced 4.4 percentage points to take 28.5 per cent of the vote while the SPD slumped by 9.3 points for a third-place 16.4 percent result.

Germany’s Catholic bishops reacted quickly to the national election on Sunday, saying they hoped the “democratic centre” could soon form a government and deal with challenges from the far-right.

Without naming any parties, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, president of the bishops’ conference, made clear he supported a coalition of the first-placed Christian Democrats (CDU) and third-placed Social Democrats (SPD) to block the far-right runner-up Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

“I hope that we will now quickly get a stable government that will tackle the problems,” he told the KNA outlet. “Germany must be integrated into a democratic Europe, as a country with a rule of law, freedom, cosmopolitanism and solidarity.”

With an 82 per cent voter turnout, the CDU advanced 4.4 percentage points to lead at 28.5 per cent of the vote while the formerly governing SPD slumped by 9.3 points for a third-place 16.4 percent result.

That will be enough for a “grand coalition” that can exclude the populist AfD, which focused on growing discontent with immigration and the economy to surge by 10.4 points to a total of 20.8 per cent.

Prelates across the Catholic spectrum echoed Bätzing’s words.

The Archbishop of Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, a leading Church conservative, hoped for a coalition that could “promote social cohesion and effectively counteract all tendencies towards division and polarisation”.

Archbishop Stephen Heße of Hamburg, who supports women’s ordination, said: “From my Christian perspective, social justice and the integration of the people who come to us must have a firm place on the political agenda.”

In Paderborn, Archbishop Udo Markus Bentz praised the high voter turnout and hoped politicians would now find “a way of working together that puts the people and the tasks they are responsible for at the centre, above and beyond party political interests, and lives up to the trust of the voters”.

Irme Stetter-Karp, head of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics, congratulated CDU leader Friedrich Merz on his party’s victory and added: “Anyone who wants a future cannot go back to the past in this situation. Not in climate policy. Not in economic and not in social policy.”

The AfD’s gains, she told KNA, “must challenge us to continue to fight with all our strength for our democracy and against racism”.

Protestant leaders were also quick to comment on the results. “Now after the election, the parties of the democratic centre are faced with the challenging task of dealing with this election result constructively and responsibly,” said Hamburg’s Lutheran Bishop Kirsten Fehrs, head of the national federation of the Evangelical Church in Germany.

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