CDU Ally Challenges Merz's Firewall Against Far-Right AfD in Germany

BERLIN — A key ally of Friedrich Merz has ignited a major political debate by suggesting the chancellor’s centrist conservatives should break a taboo and cooperate with the country’s most popular party: the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Michael Kretschmer, premier of the eastern state of Saxony and a member of the chancellor’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, is challenging Merz’s insistence on keeping the country’s firewall against the surging AfD ahead of crucial elections in September that could put the far-right party in charge of a region for the first time.

“Anyone who still talks about firewalls hasn’t recognized the signs of the times,” Kretschmer, who leads a minority government in Saxony, told the Handelsblatt newspaper in an interview earlier this week. “We need to talk to anyone who wants to talk.”

With those comments, Kretschmer stirred up tensions that Merz has stubbornly sought to avoid.

Merz rules out cooperation with the far right — invoking the country’s Nazi past — but the political realities of eastern Germany are piling on the pressure for a rethink. Polls show that the AfD has a chance of winning an outright majority in Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6 and is poised to perform well in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania and Berlin later that month.

At the national level, POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the AfD as the single most popular party with 28 percent support, with the Christian Democrats on 22 percent.

For now, however, Merz is sticking to his line that Germany has a special historic responsibility that means it cannot follow the course of other EU countries where the far right has worked with the centrist mainstream.

“If a far-right party were to enter the government in Germany, it would have a completely different significance than if that were to happen in another country,” he told reporters at a press conference. “This is also tied to our history, and that’s why, for me, it’s neither a benchmark nor an example, nor something to learn from. It is, quite simply, something different. I will do everything in my power in Germany to prevent it.”

Instead, Merz said the government’s goal had to be to seek to create a climate where the far right could be defeated.

“Between now and September 6, we will strive to facilitate and achieve stable political conditions in both Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,” he said.

The challenge on the left

But the reality in the election battlegrounds is that the AfD is polling well ahead of all other parties in the eastern German states of Saxony-Anhalt (41 percent) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (36 percent).

The former communist East has long been a stronghold for the far-right force. It is also in this region that the AfD is known to be most radical, both in terms of personnel and the positions it represents. Out of the five regions in Germany’s East, four regional party branches are classified as right-wing extremist organizations by domestic intelligence agencies.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is even polling within range of reaching an outright parliamentary majority, which would allow it to take power at state level for the first time since its foundation in 2013.

Even if the AfD fails to secure an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz’s conservatives will be confronted with harsh political dynamics in September: To keep the far right out of power, they would almost certainly have to work with the populist anti-capitalist Left Party — which is also particularly strong in the East and against whom the conservatives are also maintaining a firewall, as outlined in a party resolution from 2018.

“We have clear party convention resolutions here, and I have no reason to doubt that we will abide by them,” Merz said about cooperation with the Left Party last week.

Regional politicians within his own conservative party are, however, increasingly questioning whether such promises can be upheld given the strength of parties at both ends of the political spectrum.

Kretschmer’s comments are widely seen as an attempt to start a debate about how to govern after the September elections without radically breaking pre-election promises and further eroding the CDU’s credibility.

It is an approach that is not welcomed by party leaders in Berlin.

“We are currently in the midst of a fierce political battle in three federal states, particularly with — or against — the AfD,” Steffen Bilger, one of the CDU’s parliamentary group leaders in the Bundestag, told Deutschlandfunk on Thursday. “And that’s what we should be focusing on right now, rather than starting debates like this.”

Politicians from the center-left Social Democratic Party have, meanwhile, demanded clarity from their federal coalition partners. The lead candidate for the Berlin election called on the CDU to “come clean” about whether it still ruled out cooperation with the AfD at regional level, while urging the party to open up to the far left.

“The CDU should finally admit that it can cooperate with the Left Party, because it’s simply already doing so,” Steffen Krach told news portal t-online Wednesday in view of the minority governments it leads in Saxony and Thuringia. “Anyone who now demonizes the Left Party and equates it with the AfD is deceiving voters,” he added.

The AfD, meanwhile, sounded relaxed about all the fuss, telling German media outlets via a spokesperson that the party was open to talking to everyone who wanted to.

Torben Braga, an AfD Bundestag lawmaker from the eastern state of Thuringia, however, argued that, given the party’s current strength, it would not be in its strategic interest to support a minority government in Saxony-Anhalt after the September vote.

“I don’t see why a party like the AfD, [that is polling around] a near-absolute majority, would have to keep ensuring that a minority government remains in office by securing majorities but not participating in executive decisions,” he said. “That is a situation that cannot be in the interest of our voters.”