At the CDU’s national headquarters in Berlin-Tiergarten, an oversized campaign poster now dominates the facade. Stefan Evers, the first openly gay CDU top candidate for the post of Governing Mayor, eyes pedestrians and passing cars. His message: “I am conservative. And that’s perfectly fine.” The backdrop is that the German capital will vote on September 20 to elect a new state parliament, the Abgeordnetenhaus.
Evers borrows his phrasing from the rivals across the aisle. The SPD’s later Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit had, in June 2001 at a party congress, declared: “I am gay, and that’s good.” Those nine words rank among the most famous German political quips of this century.
Evers sprang in as candidate
Currently Berlin is governed by a coalition of CDU and SPD. Finance and Culture Senator Evers has been the CDU’s top candidate for just under four weeks (TheColu.mn reported). The Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) had previously resigned.
The reason lay in debates and a succession of revelations about his misleading statements regarding crisis management during a major power outage in January. In recent polls, the CDU, Left, AfD, and Greens stood in a relatively tight race, in varying orders. The SPD lagged well behind, placing fifth by a noticeable margin.
Evers had already spoken in interviews about how deeply Wowereit’s famous line had shaped him. Wowereit had succeeded in earning cross-partisan acceptance. “That’s something one cannot value highly enough. And I’ve continued to uphold it to this day,” he said last year. He also recalled that in 2014, after Wowereit’s resignation, he wrote a personal letter to him, expressing that that very sentence held significant meaning for his own life and for his “advancement”.
The Evers slogan could also be interpreted as a defiant response to the SPD’s Queer Commissioner Alfonso Pantisano. After the Islamist terrorist attack on the CSD Berlin, Pantisano had said: “What concerns us most is that we are being politically attacked from the right and, above all, by conservative forces, by right-wing extremists, by neo-Nazis.” This sparked criticism because Pantisano equated the term “conservative” with neo-Nazis and failed to mention Islamism. The Queer Commissioner replied to the critique: “Among conservative forces I also count all religious groups that have a problem with us. And Islamists belong there.”
