Winkel re-elected Junge Union chief with 94.6% in Bonn ahead of Merz on 17 October

Winkel re-elected with his best result

Johannes Winkel was returned as chairman of the Junge Union at its Deutschlandtag in Bonn on 16 October. He won 265 of 282 valid delegate votes, while 16 delegates voted against him and two abstained. The Union does not count abstentions, which is how the figure comes to 94.6 percent. It is his strongest showing so far, following 90.5 percent in 2024 and 87.0 percent at his first election in November 2022. The 34-year-old lawyer also sits in the Bundestag as the directly elected member for Düsseldorf II, and the organisation says it has about 90,000 members.

Winkel told the gathering that the party's youth still had plenty ahead of it.

Our generation still has a lot ahead with this Union.

Pension reform and pressure on Merz

Winkel's central message concerned the pension package, and at a press conference before the gathering he warned what a collapse would mean for the government.

That would be a failure from which the federal government can hardly recover.

He wants the reform to follow the shape the commission laid out before the summer. Last year the JU opposed a pension package from the governing coalition, and Merz clashed heavily with delegates at that meeting. Eighteen young Union deputies around Winkel threatened last autumn to withhold support for stabilising the pension level after 2031, a measure that would cost 120 billion euros in tax money. The coalition holds a majority of just 12 votes in the Bundestag. The SPD is insisting on keeping retirement without deductions after 45 years of contributions, and Winkel and the 17 other members of the Junge Gruppe remain prepared to rebel against bills they see as carrying too much SPD imprint.

Wüst's warning and the state of the CDU

Hendrik Wüst, minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, also addressed the gathering and was received far more politely than Winkel. Delegates applauded their chairman for minutes, while the response to Wüst was dutiful. An Insa poll put the CDU in his state eight points lower, at 26 percent, leaving the party only five points ahead of the AfD. Wüst criticised the talks between SPD, Greens and the Linke after its election win in Berlin as a disgrace for the capital, and said the poison of antisemitism had seeped deep into the Berlin Linke.

Parties like the AfD are allies of Germany's enemies and of Europe's enemies.

He pointed to the AfD's election win in Saxony-Anhalt and to its 39 deputies in the new Magdeburg state parliament. Wüst also said Germany was in a 'serious condition', that mistakes had been made and that trust had been lost.

Merz speaks on 17 October

Chancellor Friedrich Merz is expected to address the Deutschlandtag on Saturday, 17 October, after a meeting in which he clashed with JU delegates over the pension package last year. Before the event he congratulated Winkel on X, calling the Junge Union the central driver of ideas and the strong voice of the young generation. Winkel asked that the weekend not become a 'chancellor casting', and Markus Söder and Wüst are also scheduled to speak. Winkel also hit back at SPD figure Manuela Schwesig, asking who had let themselves be bought by Russia in a dispute over the case of Bärbel Bas. Merz's authority within the party has weakened after the CDU's defeats in September state elections and poor poll numbers.