German Party Finance: The CDU

The topic of party finance is a subject about which not a word appears in any of the official reports and party conference records issued by the Christian Democratic Union in the course of the decade during which it has become established as West Germany's governing party. Like their colleagues in most middle class parties the world over, the leaders of the CDU apparently believe that silence is golden when it comes to answering Socialist taunts on this score. They are content to let the Socialists remain the only German party to publish reasonably full accounts of their sources of income, which, as the SPD does not fail to point out when attacking the “hidden masters” of the government parties, are predominantly derived from membership dues. The parties of the “Bonn coalition,” on the other hand, have been extremely distrustful of both publicity and legislation affecting this sector. In 1952 the first Adenanuer cabinet felt called upon to reject a draft Parties Law prepared by officials in the Interior Ministry, and since then the government has presented no bill to translate the Basic Law's Article 21, which regulates the parties' position, into the required legislation. Thus the constitutional provision that “parties must give public reckoning over the sources of their means” remains in practice a dead letter. Not that the sources of the non-Socialist parties' funds are really kept successfully secret, for every politically informed German knows roughly how the system works. But party officials still believe it best not to acknowledge their sources publicly. “The German Michel just wouldn't understand about those things,” as a CDU functionary put it.