CDU/CSU on culture and media

The CDU and the CSU want faster reform of public broadcasting, committing it to thrift, diversity of opinion and neutrality. Private media are to get fair competitive conditions.

The CDU and the CSU want to reform the public broadcasters. The broadcasters should spend carefully. They should show many opinions and report neutrally. Private media should have fair conditions.

The parties say the country needs an independent media landscape made up of private and public outlets. News coverage should neither lecture nor patronize and should not be one-sided. The dual media system is to be preserved. Because private media depend on advertising revenue, the parties want to ensure a fair competitive environment.

The CDU and the CSU see cultural funding as a shared public task of the federal government, the states and municipalities. They want to preserve cultural venues in cities and rural areas, continue the culture of remembrance and add colonial history to it, and strengthen the creative industries.

The CDU and the CSU want to support culture. Museums, theaters and libraries should also exist in rural areas. Germany should keep remembering its two dictatorships. It should also remember the colonial era. Clubs should count as places of culture.

The federal government is to carry out its role especially in foreign cultural policy, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Federal Cultural Foundation. Research on the East German SED dictatorship is to continue, and pension disadvantages for people who moved from East Germany and for victims of the regime are to be removed. Cultural institutions should rely more on sponsorship, patrons and business partnerships. Clubs are to be recognized as cultural venues in zoning rules. The music industry, cinema, film and games are to be supported, as are cultural education for all generations and the use of artificial intelligence in culture.

The CDU and the CSU want to preserve the cultural heritage of German expellees and resettlers and increase funding for remembering flight and expulsion. Late resettlers (Spätaussiedler) should continue to be admitted, and disadvantages in their pensions should be removed.

The CDU and the CSU want to care for the culture of expellees. Expellees are Germans who had to leave their homes in the East after the war. The federal government should give more money for this. Ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe should still be allowed to come. Their pensions should become fairer.

The federal government is to expand cultural funding under Section 96 of the Federal Expellees Act. A renamed federal institute is to get its former name back and move to Berlin. The Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation is to become independent and receive a new permanent exhibition. Responsibility for expellees, resettlers and German minorities is to return to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Relatives of late resettlers born after January 1, 1993 are to be allowed to move to Germany. The Foreign Pensions Act (Fremdrentengesetz) is to be reformed to prevent old-age poverty in this group.