BSW top candidate Claudia Wittig once again reiterates her willingness to work with the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. Politics must be based on content, it is about good politics for the country, she said in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin”. “I think you can’t simply rule out a 40 percent party – especially since it also represents a very large potential voter, which we of course also want to attract.” When asked whether she agreed with the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution's assessment that the AfD is definitely right-wing extremist, Wittig said: "I don't even know whether that is my assessment. I definitely consider the AfD to be a party that has no solutions for many important problems in our country. But the same also applies to the CDU, for example." That is why the BSW will neither elect Sven Schulze (CDU) as Prime Minister in the state parliament nor Ulrich Siegmund from the AfD. “But we want a non-partisan prime minister who has to find his own majorities for each project individually, so that policy-related politics can be made again.
SPD General Secretary Tim Klüssendorf admits that his party is too far away from the voters. “Over many years, the SPD has become – let me say this harshly – a technocratic party,” Klüssendorf told the newspapers of the Funke media group. Most recently, the AfD has established closeness to voters, “which we actually have to offer, want to offer and will create again in the future,” said the SPD politician. The AfD admitted that Klüssendorf would be successful in precisely this area. The party “organized a presence digitally and analogue, spoke the same language, complained a lot together and created projection surfaces”. He himself learned in election campaigns, on market squares and from front gardens to prefabricated buildings: "Getting people's trust back in us is very, very hard work" and only works in direct conversation.
The chairman of the CDU workers' wing (CDA), Dennis Radtke, warns of the downfall of his party if he cooperates with the AfD after the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. “The moment we work with this party and make it responsible, the CDU is broken,” said Radtke on Thursday evening on the ZDF program “maybrit illner”. “That just has to be clear to everyone.” With regard to efforts within the CDU parliamentary group in the Magdeburg state parliament for a coalition with the AfD, Radke urgently warned: “Whoever wants that and whoever goes through with something like that” is giving the AfD what it wants.
During his second election campaign visit to Saxony-Anhalt, Chancellor Merz once again warned of the consequences of a possible AfD state government. “Anyone who wants Germany to remain an open and liberal country, and anyone who wants Saxony-Anhalt to remain an interesting location that is also interesting in Europe, should not vote for the AfD on Sunday,” he said in Leuna in Saxony-Anhalt.
The Protestant parish of Wardenburg near Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) has asked a volunteer to resign from her church positions because she supports her partner's election campaign for the AfD. Church spokesman Dirk-Michael Grötzsch confirmed the event to the Evangelical Press Service (epd). The Oldenburg “Nordwest Zeitung” first reported. The decisive factor is “the ongoing proactive and public support of the AfD election campaign as well as the refusal to distance oneself from the AfD’s inhumane and inhumane statements,” said Grötzsch. This is in stark contrast to the basic beliefs of the church community.
CDU top candidate Sven Schulze explains the decision paper to exclude all toleration models with the left as an individual opinion. The largest CDU district association in the Harz had discussed it. The document is available to WELT. “That is the opinion of a single party member,” Schulze told “Stern”. “That has not been decided and is not a basis for discussion in the next few days.” The draft resolution is about excluding all models of toleration with the Left party. All “exploratory, coalition or toleration models” are categorically rejected. The CDU should not end up “in a permanent supplicant or dependent role towards the left”. However, the paper was not passed. The Harz district association is one of the particularly conservative ones in Saxony-Anhalt.
According to a report in the news magazine “Der Spiegel”, there have been 30 attacks and obstructions against media workers at AfD events since May in the ongoing state election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt. At least 43 journalists, TV teams and political influencers were affected, the magazine reported on Thursday, with reference to the German Union of Journalists (dju) within the Verdi union. The spectrum of intimidation ranges from verbal defamation and targeted obstruction of work to stalking and physical attacks, which were recorded in five cases.
