Friedrich Merz was heavily criticized for his statement about cooperation with the AfD at the municipal level. In doing so, he partly describes what is already reality. There have been isolated partnerships for years – and the SPD, Left and Greens are also involved.
The CDU already emphasizes its orientation towards Christianity in its name. Last December, Bautzen CDU District Administrator Udo Witschas published a “Christmas message” which, in the opinion of the Berlin headquarters, did not fit the party’s humane and Christian worldview. In his video, Witschas said, among other things, that refugees in the district should not be housed in gyms or in decentralized accommodation. “At this point I want to say on purpose before Christmas that it is not our intention to let sport bleed for asylum policy.”
That sounded too much like AfD to the then CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja. He asserted once again: no one intends to tear down the firewall on the right. “We emphatically distance ourselves from the district administrator’s choice of words,” Czaja let the public know, expressly speaking on behalf of the entire party, especially its chairman Friedrich Merz. “People seeking protection in our country deserve our help, our care and are treated with respect and decency. We are Democrats and Christians and we stand by our responsibilities.”
However, it quickly became apparent that Czaja did not speak for the whole party. Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, who is closer to the AfD than to his own party when it comes to sanctions against Russia, defended Witscha’s statements. They were “deliberately taken out of context” and “instrumentalized” by journalists, he said.
The Hildburghausen case
From the point of view of the parties to the left of the CDU, the firewall received another hole from the recent statements by Merz, who campaigned to accept democratic decisions in favor of the AfD. “And of course the local parliaments have to look for ways to shape the city, the state and the district together.” Although it was unclear exactly what he meant, the outrage was great. Criticism also came from the CDU and FDP. The reactions of the SPD, Greens and Left were particularly violent. Finally, Merz made it clear via Twitter: “There will be no cooperation between the CDU and the AfD at the municipal level either.”
The party leader described what has long been reality, especially in East Germany: selective cooperation with the AfD. And everyone is taking part, including the SPD, the Left and the Greens. In February, the Social Democrats in Hildburghausen, Thuringia, together with the AfD and a right-wing extremist, paved the way for the mayor, who had been appointed by the left, to be voted out of office. They saw it as “lived grassroots democracy” through citizen participation. The state SPD assessed the process in exactly the opposite way.
In the summer of 2020, the small town’s Social Democrats participated in three press releases coordinated with the AfD and another parliamentary group. After a conversation between the SPD state leadership and the comrades from Hildburghausen, the Erfurt party leadership declared that there was no cooperation between the SPD and the AfD. However, statements by Ralf Bumann as SPD parliamentary group leader in the city council did not sound like Erfurt’s description of the insight into a “mistake”. He complained on MDR that it wasn’t about factual issues, but the question: “How can the SPD work here together with the AfD?” He’s known the people “for umpteen years, they’re neighbors, they’re in a sports club. I don’t see a point of attack with that either.”
There is also cooperation with the AfD in the West
The left in Forst, Brandenburg, expelled its then parliamentary group leader in 2020 and still needed months to dissuade recalcitrant members from cooperating with the AfD. In Waren an der Müritz in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, there was a violent protest from the FDP in January 2020 because the SPD, Left and Greens in the finance committee of the city parliament had supported a motion by the AfD parliamentary group to use the urban forest. The then FDP MP Toralf Schnur reported at the time: “They all knew what they were doing. They did it anyway.” This was promptly followed by outrage and protestations by the state associations of the SPD, Left and Greens not to form an alliance with the AfD.
Cooperation is also known from West German cities. A former Christian Democrat from the community of Frankenstein in Rhineland-Palatinate caused a sensation, who formed a joint parliamentary group in September 2019 with an AfD member – with whom she is also married. In Emmerthal in Lower Saxony, the AfD was able to tip the scales with two MPs. SPD and Greens as well as CDU and Free Voters formed two groups with eleven votes each. “The CDU isn’t afraid to do something with the AfD,” said former SPD mayor Andreas Grossmann. Former CDU faction leader Rüdiger Welzhofer thought the statement was unfair. “If things don’t go on, we’ll always get the AfD club,” he said. In the meantime, the majority in Emmerthal has shifted.
Especially Saxony
But it is above all Saxony where cooperation between the CDU and AfD repeatedly makes the headlines. At the end of March 2021, the Christian Democrats prevented the “Alliance for Democracy, Tolerance and Civil Courage” based in Plauen from receiving 8,000 euros from the city treasury. The CDU, together with AfD and the neo-Nazi party “Third Way”, voted against the subsidy. In October 2019, the district council in Bautzen, Saxony, elected an AfD representative as the second deputy district administrator, also with votes from the CDU. The post has no formal decision-making authority – but the symbolism was tough. However, the CDU also repeatedly votes against AfD applications.
The fact that there are sympathizers of formal cooperation with the AfD among East German Christian Democrats is known at the latest from the “memorandum” presented by two CDU MPs in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in the summer of 2019, which said: “We must succeed again in reconciling the social and the national.” The deputy chairman of the CDU district association in Meissen, Saxony, Sven Eppinger, put his point of view in a nutshell: “Walls always fall.