Parties can no longer be untangled. Perhaps their youth can.
Why Not a New Party
For a long time we assumed that the renewal of democracy needs a new party. The existing parties seemed beyond saving. They are entangled in cronyism, what Germans call Filz: whoever wants to rise must take the only entrance we described in “The Long March through the Party”, and whoever reaches the top has learned not to disturb. Their structures and rules come from another age; we examined them in “The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties” (German only). As early as 1911 Robert Michels showed that every organisation produces a leadership layer that uses it for itself. A tangle that has formed in this way cannot be undone from within.
But the new party has a problem too, and it is no smaller. It starts from zero: without members, without money, without experience, without access to media and administration, with the five-per-cent threshold in front of it. Almost all new parties of recent decades have failed or been pushed to the margins. The one that grew large tipped in a direction its founders did not want. A new party has ideas but no levers.
Between the entangled old and the powerless new there is a third place we have overlooked: the parties’ youth organisations. They have members, money and access. And they have something no party has.
What Distinguishes the Youth from the Party
In the Junge Union, the youth organisation of Germany’s Christian Democrats, membership ends at 35. That sounds like a formality. It is the most effective protection against cronyism an organisation can have. Nobody there can build up his position for thirty years. Every generation of functionaries must make room for the next after a few years. What grows together in the party over decades is cut back in the youth every few years.
In addition, the young have little to lose. They do not yet hold the posts they would have to give up, they have no pension entitlements from mandates yet, they are not indebted to networks. And they have an interest of their own that often contradicts the party’s: they are the ones who will pay the bill being issued today. We described how that bill comes about in “The Structural Redistribution Between Generations”.
That is the opportunity. The danger is just as clear: the youth organisation is at the same time the antechamber of the tangle. This is where the long march through the party is practised. Jens Spahn joined the Junge Union at fifteen trained as a bank clerk after leaving school and sat in the Bundestag at 22. He never worked in his profession after that. We described his CV in “The End Product” (German only). The young can untangle. They can also be the school in which the tangle is learned.
When It Worked and When It Did Not
History knows both outcomes.
The Jusos in 1969. At their national congress in Munich the Young Socialists carried out their “turn to the left” and openly opposed their own party’s course. They shaped the SPD for decades: its themes, its personnel, its tone. It is the proof that a party’s youth can change the party.
The Andes Pact of 1979. On a trip to South America young functionaries of the Junge Union made a pact: they would not stand in each other’s way on the way up. Almost all of them later became minister-presidents or ministers, among them Roland Koch, Christian Wulff, Günther Oettinger and Peter Müller. They did not renew the CDU. The departure became a network of mutual patronage. The Andes Pact is the object lesson in how a youth does not dissolve the tangle but takes it over.
Kevin Kühnert in 2018. The Juso chairman led the campaign against a new grand coalition. He lost the vote but won the party and became its general secretary. In the end he was part of the leadership he had set out against, and withdrew exhausted. The revolt was not defeated. It was absorbed.
Sebastian Kurz in 2017. The strongest and at the same time the most cautionary case. The head of the Young ÖVP took over the whole Austrian People’s Party, but only on conditions: he determined the lists and the personnel, and the party ran under his name and in a new colour. It was the most radical renewal of a people’s party from below in Europe. Four years later he resigned under the pressure of investigations. His renewal was tied to a person, and it fell with the person. Whoever wants to untangle must not set up a new court.
The Green Youth in 2024. Its entire federal board left the party to found a group of its own. That is the other outcome: whoever cannot change the party leaves it. For the renewal of the centre it is no model. But it shows that the threat of leaving is real.
A rule follows from these five cases. A party’s youth renews its party when it has a programme and not a person, when it sets conditions and does not demand posts, and when in an emergency it is prepared to leave. It fails when its members understand the revolt as a job application.
The Junge Union Today
The Junge Union is the largest political youth organisation in Germany. It is the joint youth of the CDU and the CSU; in Bavaria it appears as the Junge Union Bayern with weight of its own. So it speaks from the outset for two parties.
In the autumn of 2025 it took on its own government’s pension package. It could not stop it, but the revolt gave it weight: its chairman Johannes Winkel is deputy leader of the parliamentary group, a young MP is its chief whip, and a JU vice-chair sat on the pension commission. At its Deutschlandtag in Bonn in October 2026 it appeared as never before: the largest gathering in its history, Winkel re-elected with the best result ever, and from him the sentence: “Perhaps we need a new Union.” The Basic Law, he said, contains no guarantee of eternity for people’s parties. The mother party is at the same time in the worst crisis of its history.
All this speaks for it. Looked at without mercy, a few things speak against it.
Its bill has so far been addressed mainly to the pensioners. Of the large inheritances we described in “We Will Keep Inheriting” there is little talk. A generational justice that bills only the old and spares the heirs is none. It shifts the burden from one group to another and leaves untouched the real inequality, the one that runs straight through the young. What Winkel meant by “the centre” in Bonn stays within the same frame: income splitting for families and an untouched parental allowance. He mocked papers “that bring hardly anything new”. At this point his own speech did not bring anything new either.
It did not properly account for state funding and must repay 350,000 euros; the CDU had to help out. Whoever demands care from the state with the next generation’s money must start with himself.
And it is divided on the most important question. In September its then treasurer called the firewall against the AfD a “failed project”. A renewal that begins by opening the boundary to the far right would not be a renewal of the centre but its end. The chairman, too, draws the line only with a proviso: he distances himself from the AfD “as long as” ethnic-nationalist and far-right thinking is tolerated there. That is no firewall but a condition with an expiry date. Added to this is his explanation for the rise of the AfD: normal positions had been branded as far-right. Merz started out with the same explanation, and it got him nowhere.
And finally its revolt has so far been a revolt with a reward. It has brought posts. That is not reprehensible, but it is exactly the point at which the Andes Pact began.
In Bonn it became visible where this path can lead. The first guest speaker was Hendrik Wüst, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia and for many the chancellor-in-waiting. He praised the Junge Union at length, for he will need it if he becomes the candidate for chancellor. Neither of them said much about the current chancellor. A youth that makes the next chancellor gains influence. But it also becomes someone else’s tool. It would then stand somewhere between the Andes Pact and Kurz. The real test is therefore not Merz but Wüst: whether the JU sets him conditions or merely cheers him on. That the applause for him was rather dutiful speaks in its favour for now.
What an Untangling Youth Would Need
If the Junge Union wants to be more than a louder part of the old machine, it needs something that goes beyond the pension question. We see five elements.
A programme instead of a person. The renewal must hang on content that still holds when Winkel turns 35. Kurz is the counter-example.
A complete generational balance sheet. Not just pensions, but also interest, inheritances, housing, education and climate burdens. Whoever honestly draws up the generations’ bill must also name the heirs, including those in their own ranks.
A self-commitment against the long march. For example this one: no member stands for parliament before having worked for some years outside politics. That would be a sentence by which seriousness could be measured, and it would break the pattern we described in “The End Product”. In Bonn Winkel himself demanded that credibility and arguments count for more than incumbency and background. This self-commitment would show whether he means it.
Clean accounts of its own and open doors. Full disclosure of its own finances, and places for newcomers who have not come up through the local branches. An organisation that wants to untangle the party must show that it is not entangled itself.
A clear boundary to the right. One does not renew the centre by dissolving its edges.
And behind these stands a sixth element that the cases in section III teach: the readiness to set conditions. In Bonn Winkel said: “If we manage to implement decisions together, then you will have us at your side.” That is a beginning. Renewal begins where this “if” applies not only to pensions but to the way the party organises itself.
The Generational Pact
Once such a concept is in place, the Junge Union can do something no party can: approach the youth organisations of the other parties of the centre. The Jusos, the Young Liberals and the Green Youth face the same mechanism. Their mother parties distribute the same bill to the same generation, only with different justifications.
That would be the counterpart to the Andes Pact. Back then young men agreed not to obstruct one another on the way up. Today young people from different parties could agree to support one another on the substance: a common minimum agenda of the young on the questions where they all stand on the same side. An honest generational balance sheet, debt only for what lasts, an inheritance tax without loopholes for large fortunes, affordable housing, schools that are not frozen. No coalition, no common programme, only a pact on substance against which no mother party could easily govern.
Whether it succeeds does not depend on the idea. It depends on whether the young resist the temptation to turn the pact into a career ladder. That is where the Andes Pact failed.
The Open Question
Can a youth renew a party whose logic has shaped it? The age limit gives it a chance no party has. Its interests give it a reason. The crisis of the mother party gives it an opportunity such as there has not been for a long time.
What it still lacks is the insight that the pension question is only the beginning, and the courage to set conditions that go beyond its own advancement. If it finds that insight, perhaps Germany does not need a new party. Then it needs only a youth that refuses to become like those who came before it.
Sources. Junge Union: Fabian Busch, analysis of the Deutschlandtag in Bonn, October 2026; t-online, 17 October 2026; web.de, 17 October 2026; Tagesspiegel, September and October 2026; Volker Petersen, “Wüst und Winkel”, ntv.de, 16 October 2026. · Jusos 1969 and 2018: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, “NoGroko – die Jusos in der SPD”; Wikipedia, “Young Socialists in the SPD”. · Andes Pact: Tichys Einblick, “Der Mythos ‚Andenpakt’ war stets größer als seine Bedeutung”. · Sebastian Kurz: ZDFheute, acquittal on appeal, May 2025. · Robert Michels: Political Parties, 1911.