The leader of Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has rowed back from comments that his party was willing to cooperate with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) at a local political level.
Friedrich Merz’s remarks triggered cries of protest from his own party and raised concerns about the firewall between German conservatives and the far right.
In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Merz categorically ruled out joining a coalition with the AfD at a national level but said such a taboo should not apply to local politics.
“Of course we are obliged to accept democratic votes,” Merz said. “And if the head of a district authority or a mayor is voted in who belongs to the AfD, then of course you find ways to continue to work in that town.”
German politicians from across the spectrum – including within Merz’s own camp – reacted with outrage, leading the CDU leader to backpedal.
“To clarify it once again, and I never said it differently: the CDU resolution is valid. There will be no CDU cooperation on the local level with the AfD,” Merz tweeted on Monday.
Fears however lingered that Merz could in future be open to breaching a fundamental taboo in Germany’s politics since the second world war.
The AfD won its first German district council in the eastern state of Thuringia last month, and secured its first mayoral post, in Saxony-Anhalt, at the start of July. Recent polls show the rightwing populist outfit at 20-22% of the vote, behind the CDU on 26-28% – both ahead of the three centre-left, green and liberal parties that form Germany’s government.
The CDU mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, strongly distanced himself from the party leader’s comments on Sunday evening. “What cooperation is there to be had?” Wegner said in a tweet. “The CDU cannot, does not want and won’t work with a party whose business model is hatred, division and exclusion.”
The MP Norbert Röttgen, who ran against Merz for the party leadership, warned on Sunday that the AfD “knowingly admits and invites extremist forces into the party” and called it unacceptable for the CDU to work with it “on any level”.
Across Europe, several conservative parties have in recent years retreated from a prohibitive stance on working with the far right. In Sweden, the nationalist Sweden Democrats function as a support party for the centre-right government, while Spain’s conservative Partido Popular has formed regional coalition governments with the far-right Vox, and could attempt to form a power-sharing pact after Sunday’s national vote.
In Germany, the firewall between the CDU and AfD was fiercely protected under the leadership of Angela Merkel. In 2020, her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, stepped down as party leader when she appeared to lack authority to stop Christian Democrat delegates in Thuringia from voting with the AfD to oust the state’s leftwing premier.
Sharing news of Merz’s earlier comments in a tweet, the co-leader of the AfD, Tino Chrupalla, appeared to hail them as the start of the end of the firewall stance that stopped the centre-right from cooperating or deliberately voting with the far right. “Together we will tear down this wall in the states and at federal level,” Chrupalla said.
Merz’s interview followed a series of comments that seemed to relax the CDU’s strict condemnation of the AfD, which was founded on an anti-euro ticket in 2013 but has progressively tacked harder right since. After the AfD’s district council triumph last month, Merz designated the governing Green party and not the far right as the CDU’s “main enemy”, and on Friday he described his own party as the “Alternative für Deutschland of substance”.
