Addendum to the working paper "Can the Young Untangle the Party?" of 18 October 2026.
Our working paper “Can the Young Untangle the Party?” ends with the sentence that Germany may not need a new party. This addendum is a thought experiment for the case in which the young set their conditions and nobody listens.
The youth organisations of the centre, that is the Junge Union, the Jusos, the Young Liberals and the Green Youth, leave their parent parties together and found a people’s party with four directions. We deliberately say directions and not wings. A wing fights for control of the body. A direction only shows where someone wants to go, and does not have to defeat the others.
Why this would differ from every new foundation. In the working paper we objected to a new party that it starts from zero. This party would not start from zero. It would have members, experience, familiar faces and members of parliament. And because it would come from four camps at once, no parent party could dismiss it as a splinter of the fringe.
How it would lead to new elections. Only the chancellor can call a vote of confidence, not a group of MPs. The lever lies elsewhere. The coalition has a majority of only twelve seats in the Bundestag, and the Young Group of the CDU/CSU parliamentary party has 18 members. With the pension package in December 2025 it showed that it can make the majority wobble. If these MPs leave the parliamentary group, they keep their seats, because the mandate is free, and the majority is gone. The chancellor must then choose. He can govern on as a minority chancellor or call the vote of confidence himself, as Schröder did in 2005 and Scholz in 2024. If he loses it, the Federal President can dissolve the Bundestag within 21 days, and the election must be held within 60 days. For the new party the first obstacle would then begin: it would have to secure admission to the ballot by collecting supporting signatures, within shortened deadlines.
What holds the four directions together. Not a common programme, but common rules. By leaving, the young would lose their best protection against cronyism, the age limit of 35, because a party ages with its members. The statutes must replace this protection: limited terms of office, work outside politics before any candidacy, open accounts, lists that are not drawn up in back rooms. The minimum agenda of the generational pact that we proposed in the working paper would be the common programme. Everything else would remain open between the directions and be decided by vote, not by proportional allocation.
The usual breaking point is said to be pensions: the Young Group voted against the pension package, the Jusos stand behind their party’s pension level. We consider this a sham conflict. It only arises as long as one remains stuck in the distribution battle between old and young. We will return to it separately.
What speaks against it. There are precedents, and none is encouraging. In autumn 2024 the entire board of the Green Youth left the party, but it went not to the centre but to the left fringe, and it founded not a party but an association. The BSW split from Die Linke together with MPs and narrowly failed the threshold in 2025 with 4.98 percent. The Young Liberals would bring members but no MPs, because the FDP has not been in the Bundestag since 2025. And Robert Michels applies to the new party too: it would have its apparatus before it had its first programme. Weightiest of all, however, is what Bavaria has just demonstrated. Whoever could lead such a foundation is rewarded with offices by the parent party before he thinks of leaving.
What remains. The probability that it happens this way is small. The value of the idea lies not in its execution but in making the threat credible. Eighteen MPs who could leave weigh more than any resolution of a Deutschlandtag. A youth that everyone knows can leave does not have to leave. A youth that everyone knows will stay is served with praise and posts. Bonn has shown it.
Sources. ZDFheute, “Junge Gruppe der Union lehnt Rentenpaket weiter ab”, 1 December 2025. · SRF, “Spitze der Grünen Jugend will aus Partei austreten”, 26 September 2024. · t-online, “BSW auch nach endgültigem Ergebnis nicht im Bundestag”, March 2025. · Basic Law, Articles 38, 39 and 68; Federal Elections Act, section 18.
To the working paper: Can the Young Untangle the Party? The Junge Union as a possible pioneer of a renewal of the centre.