CDU/CSU

CDU/CSU, informally also referred to as the Union parties or the Union, is the common name of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union of Bavaria, considered to be sister parties. It refers specifically to their common faction in the Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag. The two parties have a common youth organisation, called the Junge Union. In elections, the CDU does not field candidates in Bavaria, and the CSU does not field candidates outside of Bavaria.

Both the CDU and the CSU were established after World War II and had the Christian perspective of mankind in common. The reason the Christian Social Union of Bavaria is a separate party goes back to 1919, when its predecessor, the Bavarian People's Party, broke away from the Catholic Centre Party (considered the de facto predecessor of the CDU) in order to pursue a more conservative, more Catholic and more Bavarian particularist course.

On issues of federal policies the CDU and CSU seldom differ, but they remain legally and organisationally separate parties. The differences between the CDU and the somewhat more socially conservative CSU has sometimes led to conflicts in the past. The most notable and serious such incident was in 1976, when the CSU under Franz Josef Strauß ended the alliance with the CDU at a party conference in Wildbad Kreuth. This decision was reversed shortly thereafter when the CDU threatened to run candidates against the CSU in Bavaria.

Parliamentary chairpeople of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag

• Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo (1949–1955)
• Heinrich Krone (1955–1961)
• Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo (1961–1964)
• Rainer Barzel (1964–1973)
• Karl Carstens (1973–1976)
• Helmut Kohl (1976–1982)
• Alfred Dregger (1982–1991)
• Wolfgang Schäuble (1991–2000)
• Friedrich Merz (2000–2002)
• Angela Merkel (2002–2005)
• Volker Kauder (2005–)

See also

• Politics of Germany

External links

• CDU/CSU-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag