Although the CDU / CSU lost support in the 2009 federal elections, the FDP experienced the best election cycle in their history, thereby enabling a CDU / CSU-FDP coalition.

While the conservative wing of the German political spectrum, primarily formed of the CDU and CSU, enjoys considerable support, this support tends to be less extended to Stoiber.

Adenauer worked diligently at building up contacts and support in the CDU over the next years, and he sought with varying success to impose his particular ideology on the party.

He was responsible for the slogan " Freiheit statt Sozialismus " ( Freedom instead of Socialism ) with which the CDU had great success in the 1976 elections.

On the left, the Leftwing Bloc achieved its best result ever and made the biggest climb, gaining 5 MPs, while the CDU ( Communists and the Greens ) gained 2 MPs and reversed their downward trend of the last elections.

Once again CCD and CDU formed an alliance for the 2001 general election, this time gaining only 3. 2 % of the vote, as part of the winning House of Freedoms coalition composed mainly of Forza Italia, the National Alliance and Lega Nord.

He enjoys considerably more support in his home state of Bavaria than in the rest of Germany, where CDU chairwoman Angela Merkel is more popular.

He was accused by many in the CDU / CSU of offering " half-hearted " support to Angela Merkel, with some even accusing him of being reluctant to support a female candidate from the East.

In 1966 Erhard lost support and Kurt Kiesinger ( 1904 – 1988 ) was elected as Chancellor by a new CDU / CSU-SPD alliance combining the two largest parties.

Still, Genscher was one of the FDP's driving forces when, in 1982, the party switched sides from its coalition with the SPD to support the CDU / CSU in their Constructive Vote of No Confidence to have Helmut Schmidt replaced with Helmut Kohl as Chancellor.

Under previous governments, especially those led by the CDU, the West German government had shown more rhetorical support for German refugees and expellees.

Theodor Heuss was elected the first President of the Republic, and Adenauer was elected Chancellor ( head of government ) on 16 September 1949 with the support of his own CDU, the Christian Social Union and the liberal Free Democratic Party.

Small town and rural support comes especially from the traditionally Protestant areas of northern Germany and Brandenburg ( with notable exceptions such as Western Pomerania where CDU leader Angela Merkel was re-elected in 2005 ) and a number of university towns.

Meanwhile the Centre Party tried to forge an alliance of small parties of Christian persuasion, to offer an alternative to disappointed CDU / CSU voters, but it only gained the support of the " Bavarian Party ".

The programme also asserted Christian Democrats ' support for working class ' leading role in establishing socialism, a development which the CDU regarded from its 6th Congress on as historically necessary and consistent ".

As a result, the Alliance ' 90 / The Greens and a new founded local party ( BIG ) made the decision to support Eckhard Schwerhoff, a CDU party member but not involved in the politics of Gladbeck until then.

Led by Pier Ferdinando Casini, Lorenzo Cesa and Rocco Buttiglione, the faction included also Mario Tassone ( co-leader with Buttiglione of a sub-group composed of former members of the CDU, which controlled more than 15 % of party delegates ), Michele Vietti, Luca Volontè, Francesco D ' Onofrio, Maurizio Ronconi, Francesco Bosi and Antonio De Poli, and gained the support of at least 45 % of party members.

Instead, Wulff declared his support for Angela Merkel, the CDU leader in the Bundestag.

In spite of support from the Premiers of Bavaria ( Edmund Stoiber ( CSU )) and Hesse ( Roland Koch ( CDU )), Schäuble did not receive the party ’ s nomination in the end because CDU leader Angela Merkel, other CDU politicians and the liberal FDP party spoke out against him.

In 1998 Clemente Mastella and several other MPs left the party to form, along with the CDU, the Democratic Union for the Republic ( UDR ), that came into support to the centre-left government.

* APG-66 ( V ) – Employed in select US Navy P-3 Orion aircraft as part of a Counter Drug Update ( CDU ) for Counter-narcotics ( CN ) surveillance and interdiction operations in support of USCG

In October 2009, the Greens announced that they would support a government led by the CDU, in coalition with the FDP, in Saarland, forming Germany's first, highly experimental, ' Jamaica coalition '.

It is organised since 1977 by the Junge Union, the youth branch of Germany's two main conservative political parties, the CDU and CSU, and attracts all age groups from Abensberg and surrounding areas.

No Chancellor has ever come from the CSU, although Franz Josef Strauss and Edmund Stoiber were CDU / CSU candidates for Chancellor in the 1980 election and the 2002 election, respectively, which were both won by the SPD.

For example, Helmut Kohl's CDU governed for years in coalition with the Free Democratic Party ( FDP ), from 1998 to 2005 Gerhard Schröder's SPD was in power with the Greens and from 2009 Angela Merkel, CDU / CSU was in power with the FDP.

The CDU won in some important state elections but was hit in 2000 by a party donation scandal from the Kohl years.

' ( Strong applause from CDU / DA, DSU, FDP, partly SPD and the deputies standing up in their seats.

" ( Jubilant cheers from the CDU / DA, DSU and SPD.

Although the GAL had to agree to the deepening of the Elbe River, the construction of a new coal-fired power station and two road projects they had opposed, they also received some significant concessions from the CDU.

" Erhard was politically less successful when he served as the CDU Chancellor from 1963 until 1966.

In 1998 Rau stepped down from his positions as SPD Chairman and Minister President, and on 23 May 1999, was elected Federal President by the Federal Assembly of Germany to succeed Roman Herzog ( CDU ).

Riding a wave of popularity from the return of the last POWs from Soviet labor camps, as well as an extensive pension reform, Adenauer led the CDU / CSU to the first — and as of 2011, only — outright majority in a free German election.

A split from the PPI, the United Christian Democrats ( CDU ), joined Forza Italia and the CCD in the centre-right Pole of Freedoms coalition ( later becoming the Pole for Freedoms ), while the PPI was a founding member of The Olive Tree centre-left coalition in 1996.

He was Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 ( of West Germany between 1982 and 1990 and of the reunited Germany between 1990 and 1998 ) and the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union ( CDU ) from 1973 to 1998.

He immediately resigned as CDU leader and largely retired from politics.

Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard (; 4 February 1897 – 5 May 1977 ) was a German politician affiliated with the CDU and Chancellor of West Germany from 1963 until 1966.

Many of Brandt's reforms met with resistance from state governments ( dominated by CDU / CSU ).

In the beginning, it was not clear which party would be favored by the victors of the Second World War, but by the end of the 1940s, the left-wing governments of USA and Britain began to lean toward the CDU and away from the Social Democratic Party of Germany ( SPD ).

The CDU continued its role as opposition until 1982, when the FDP ’ s withdrawal from the coalition with the SPD allowed the CDU to regain power.

After negotiations, the Saarland Greens rejected the option of a left-wing ' red-red-green ' coalition with the SPD and The Left ( Die Linke ) in order to form a centre-right state government with the CDU and Free Democratic Party ( FDP ), a historical first time that a Jamaica coalition has formed in German politics.

By the time the first national elections were held in the Federal Republic in 1949, Kiesinger had joined the Christian Democratic Union ( CDU ) and won a seat in the Bundestag, the West German parliament.

However, Erhard was regarded and treated as a long-time CDU member and as the party chairman by almost everyone in Germany at the time, including the vast majority of the CDU itself.

The SPD quickly gained popularity and succeeded in forming a social-liberal coalition with the FDP following the 1969 federal election, forcing the CDU out of power for the first time in their history.

But many, if not most, observers at the time believed that the CDU had concluded that Helmut Schmidt's SPD was likely unbeatable in 1980, and felt that they had nothing to lose in running Strauss.

Others, like Nooke, who left some time later, resented the growing cooperation with Christian Democratic Union ( CDU ) of East Germany, which had formerly been a party in the socialist dominated democratic block of parties and mass organisations and had supported the totalitarian regime.

Despite basing its 2005 election campaign on Simonis ' popularity, the SPD suffered a heavy defeat due to the bad economic situation and dropped down to 38. 7 % ( for the first time in almost twenty years behind the CDU ).

They also have had 3 MEPs in the European Parliament since the European Elections of 2009 ( 10, 73 %, surpassing for the first time the CDU platform, formed by the Greens and the Portuguese Communist Party ) and many local councillors.

At the time of the 2007 election, the CDU formed an alliance with the Progressive Movement ( MP ) of Jean-Jacques Ekindi, agreeing not to run candidates in the Wouri Centre constituency, where the MP was competing.

During that time, Götting came to hold a number of influential positions within the East German state: from 1949 to 1963, he served as the Chairman of the CDU faction in the People's Chamber ; from 1958 to 1963 as Deputy Prime Minister of the GDR ; and from 1963 to November 1989 Götting served as Deputy Chairman of the Council of State, a position equivalent in rank to the vice-presidency of the GDR.

In June 2001, the grand coalition under Eberhard Diepgen ( CDU ) was broken following a scandal about the CDU parliamentary leader Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky: He had been the CEO of a public mortgage bank at the same time and, in this role, he had financed a risky deal of two men, who had donated money to the local CDU organisation.

In 1966, for the first time in fifteen years, the German economy went into recession and the FDP finally withdrew from Ludwig Erhard's CDU / CSU / FDP coalition government.

Jürgen Rüttgers ( born June 26, 1951 in Cologne ) is a German politician ( CDU ) and former Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, widely known for his views on immigration and the much-discussed phrase " Kinder statt Inder " (" children instead of Indians ") which was a media interpretation of " Statt Inder an die Computer müssen unsere Kinder an die Computer " (" instead of Indians in front of computers, our children must be in front of computers "), during an election campaign ( which he finally lost ) at a time when there was a parallel nationwide discussion about whether or whether not immigration rules should be liberalised on behalf of attracting more highly qualified foreign academics to the German labor market.

He was for a time leader of the CDU in that body, and in 1967 became state party chairman, an office which he held until 1982.

Carstensen was the CDU ’ s top candidate for the 2005 state election, in which Carstensen led the CDU to its best result since Uwe Barschel ’ s resignation in 1987 with 40. 2 % of all votes cast, making the CDU the strongest party in the state parliament for the first time since 1983.