CDU state premiers Kretschmer, Schulze, and Voigt contradict their earlier positions on pension policy.

Michael Kretschmer of Saxony, Sven Schulze of Saxony-Anhalt, and Mario Voigt of Thuringia—three CDU state premiers, a position roughly comparable to that of a U.S. governor—now jointly oppose abolishing the full pension without early-retirement reductions after 45 years of contributions.

Their current demands therefore do not contain a fundamental disagreement among the three politicians. The apparent contradictions are between positions they expressed earlier and those they hold today.

In November 2025, Kretschmer criticized the pension policy then in place and said that ending the policy commonly known as “retirement at 63” had not been possible with the SPD, Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party. This indicated that he was generally in favor of abolishing the provision.

He is now calling for it to be retained. According to media reports, Schulze and Voigt also supported the pension commission’s overall reform package during a June 2026 meeting of the CDU’s national executive committee.

Both were reported to have praised the proposals without voicing clear objections, even though the package already called for abolishing the full pension after 45 contribution years. A few weeks later, both explicitly opposed that specific measure.

Their earlier support for the overall package does not, however, conclusively prove that Schulze and Voigt personally supported every individual recommendation. There is also an additional distinction in Schulze’s case.

In November 2025, he called for an end to the pension dispute at the time and supported the pension package then under consideration. That package was not identical to the pension commission’s 2026 recommendations and therefore does not, by itself, prove that his current position contradicts the one he held in 2025.