For more than an hour, Markus Lanz works through the rubble of the CDU's election defeat in Saxony-Anhalt and its new role as opposition in a state parliament in which the AfD has the most seats. The moderator finds it particularly incomprehensible why his studio guest and former CDU top candidate Sven Schulze took over the leadership of his party's parliamentary group despite the debacle.
"Now someone has been voted out and has reacted to it very confidently. And says: 'Okay, I understand.' And then you turn around and he's back again," Lanz said to the Prime Minister on Thursday evening. Schulze actually announced his resignation after the election defeat. But now the impression arises that he is clinging to power. Especially since the result in the parliamentary group – which has shrunk from 40 to 15 members – was extremely close for Schulze.
The CDU politician vehemently rejects the accusation. “On Monday evening, when I resigned as party leader, I had no intention of running for parliamentary group leader on Tuesday,” says the 47-year-old. He would also have liked there to have been more time between the evening of the election and the election of the group leader: "But there was no other way. The group decided to elect its group leader that day." He was asked to stand as a candidate. “They said, ‘Don’t give up completely.’ And that was the background to the whole story.” When Lanz wants to know who these people were, Schulze doesn't give any names.
Lanz, the CDU politician, repeatedly wants to pin down the question of how the Union in Saxony-Anhalt - and thus in the state parliament under his leadership - wants to deal with an AfD that is stronger than ever before. The “Handelsblatt” journalist Annett Meiritz also commented that “as a political observer” she had not yet understood “what the new offer should be” and how the CDU wanted to win back its voters in Saxony-Anhalt.
Lanz is therefore trying to lure Schulze with a thought experiment about what the CDU's opposition work could look like in the future. What would happen, for example, if the AfD introduced a motion in the state parliament that the CDU actually considers to be correct? For example, the reduction in real estate transfer tax. "Do you then vote for this actually very good suggestion? Or do you say: Because it comes from them, absolutely not?" asks the moderator.
Schulze first tries evasion. It is rather AfD leader Ulrich Sigmund who is currently looking for other majorities, keyword BSW. And for Sigmund it will be difficult “to organize long-term majorities in this constellation”. But then the CDU politician says something that makes Lanz sit up and take notice: "We will look at every issue in the opposition in the future. And then we will decide how we will vote on it in the state parliament."
To be on the safe side, the moderator asks again: “And if that’s good, would you also vote with the AfD if in doubt?” – “If that’s good, ideally it will come from us, even as the opposition,” answers Schulze. “But we are not the ones who plan to permanently help the AfD gain majorities.”
Lanz asks a third time whether he has understood correctly: “Not permanently, but if you think it’s good, would you do it?”
Schulze sticks to his line. “We will look at every single topic,” he says, but leaves it open which topics these could be. "But it's not the case that we completely refuse and say: We only have one line. Rather, we are now the opposition. And we have to be the opposition, if you look at every issue."
When Lanz asks the "Handelsblatt" journalist Meiritz whether she also notices that "something is starting to shake," she summarizes the CDU politician's statements as follows: "Well, at least, I just understood you to be saying: (...) If that's the case in individual cases, you would vote."
Whereupon Lanz asks Schulze directly: “Don’t you even have to say the honest sentence: The firewall will be history at that point.”
The CDU politician doesn't want to go that far: "I never thought the firewall issue was right," says Schulze. A fire wall also doesn’t mean “that the burning behind it will stop.” He therefore considers the parties' previous dealings with the AfD to have been a failure. For him, the fundamental question is whether the AfD, if the CDU worked with it, would become smaller and not even larger? “To be honest, I don’t see it that way automatically,” sums up Schulze.
Instead of a quick change of course, Schulze is calling for a fundamental debate about the future of the Union. “We as the CDU have to think about what course we should take overall in the next few years.”
