Boris Rhein calls for openness towards the AfD among committee chairs

According to the Hessian CDU leader and Prime Minister Boris Rhein, the CDU should support the election of AfD candidates as chairmen of Bundestag committees. “The party is elected, and that’s how you should treat it,” Rhein told Stern in an interview.

In his opinion, "for example, the AfD should be able to take over committee chairs in the Bundestag - as is usual in the state parliament of Hesse and other states," said the CDU state chairman. "It's important to me: We clearly differentiate ourselves from the AfD, but we don't exclude the party. This must also apply to parliamentary work."

The CDU and CSU faction in the Bundestag rejected the proposal. The parliamentary secretary of the Union faction, Catarina dos Santos-Wintz, rejected such a change of course. “There is no right to chair a committee,” she told the AFP news agency.

“The committee members elect their chairmen themselves,” emphasized dos Santos-Wintz. "In the German Bundestag, members of the AfD were clearly unable to get their offer accepted. This can certainly be different in state parliaments."

The domestic policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Sebastian Fiedler, argued similarly. “I don’t understand what problem Boris Rhein has,” explained Fiedler when asked by AFP. The candidates proposed by the AfD so far did not receive the necessary majority in the committees. “The reason for this lies with the candidates and not with the members of the committees,” explained Fiedler. "Otherwise they would get a majority."

Like other factions in the Bundestag, the AfD has the right to propose the chair of several specialist committees. However, the candidates it put forward did not receive the votes of MPs from other parties in the respective elections and therefore failed to achieve the necessary majorities.

As in the past, Rhein spoke out against the initiation of an AfD ban procedure. “I advise fighting the AfD not legally, but politically,” he told the magazine.

The SPD politician Fiedler criticized it as “somewhat worrying that the Hessian Prime Minister is falling for several of the AfD’s narratives.” When Rhein calls for the AfD to be given political power, he is ignoring the fact that "parties can only be defeated politically if they - like everyone else - stick to the rules of the game," he explained.

After the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Rhine had already expressed criticism of the concept of the fire wall. "Talk to everyone, talk about everything, build bridges in the middle, don't push them behind firewalls," he told broadcaster Welt TV.

In terms of content, Rhein ruled out collaboration with the AfD - but called for more openness towards AfD voters: "What kind of attitude is this to leave people behind a firewall? Well, there's a fire there - and we're not bringing people in behind the firewall? That's not Christian democratic."