German opposition leader fumes after easing stance on far-right AfD

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Friedrich Merz, the leader of the German Christian Democrats, has sparked outrage in his party by suggesting that the CDU could team up with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) at the local level.

Berlin’s CDU mayor Kai Wegener said there could be no cooperation with a party whose business model is hatred, division and exclusion.

Germany’s main opposition party, the CDU, has a strict policy of refusing to work with the AfD, a party whose hardline views on immigration, hostility towards Muslims and ties to the hard-right have made it synonymous with extremism.

But some in the CDU say privately that given the party’s electoral success in East Germany, its “firewall” against the AfD may be difficult to maintain on a long-term basis.

The AfD is currently receiving 22 percent of the vote, well ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and only four points behind the CDU. Experts say it is benefiting from widespread anger over unregulated immigration, inflation and high energy costs, as well as a ban on new oil- and gas-fired boilers imposed by Scholz’s coalition partners, the Greens.

Last month an AfD politician was elected head of the district council of Sonneberg in the eastern state of Thuringia – a first for the party. A few days later an AfD candidate won an election for mayor in the neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt.

In an interview with public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday evening, Merz said that the CDU would not cooperate with the AfD in the European, regional and national parliaments. But he added that if the AfD won the post of mayor or head of the district council, they were “democratic elections” and “we have to accept that”.

“And of course in local councils you have to find ways of running things together across towns, rural areas and districts,” he added.

Merz, the former president of BlackRock Germany, has long upset the left wing of his party with his conservative views. This month he said that the CDU should aim to become “the alternative to Germany – solid”.

Other CDU politicians reacted sharply to the interview. CDU politician and deputy speaker of parliament Yvonne Magwas wrote on Twitter, “Whether in the district council or in the Bundestag, the radical right will remain the radical right.” “For the Christian Democrats, right-wing radicals are always the enemy!”

The Christian Democrats said Merz’s comments contradicted resolutions adopted at CDU party conferences, which explicitly ruled out any cooperation with the AfD.

One said that anyone advocating rapprochement with the AfD should be aware that it is a party that “knowingly tolerates far-right views, anti-Semitism and racism in its ranks”.

Tobias Hans, former CDU prime minister of the small state of Saarland, said, “What we are seeing here is an increasingly desperate attempt by the extreme right to undermine the party’s proposals after electoral successes.”

The AfD welcomed Merz’s comments, with leader Tino Kruppalla saying the CDU’s firewall had begun to collapse. “Together in the regions and at the national level, we will bring down these walls,” he wrote in a tweet. “The citizens of this country will be the winners.”

Merz was also supported by CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann, who insisted that there was no change in the party’s hard line on the AfD. But “suppose a local council is discussing a new day nursery, we cannot vote against it just because the AfD is voting for it”, he told Bild Zeitung. “We are not making ourselves dependent on right wing fanatics.”