The German mainstream parties’ decision to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party is wreaking havoc on regional politics in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg.
Ignoring the will of the voters expressed in recent elections, all the other parties—from the hard left to the centre-right—have vowed not to collaborate with the AfD, and are instead trying to construct coalition governments, despite disagreeing with each other on a range of issues; an undertaking that has proven both difficult and slow to show viable results.
For the centre-right CDU, the AfD, which picked up about a third of the votes in the three eastern states, would be its most natural ally, but the party leadership is afraid of being labelled as the party that collaborates with “extremists”—which the AfD has officially been designated as by the country’s domestic intelligence agency.
The CDU has instead turned to leftist parties, since the free-market liberal FDP is no longer a viable coalition partner, following the party’s failure to enter either of the three state parliaments in September.
In Saxony, talks between the CDU, the Social Democrats (SPD), and the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) collapsed on Wednesday, November 6th, due to differences on the war in Ukraine, migration, and the budget.
Sahra Wagenknecht, the leader of the BSW party, has demanded that the CDU change its policy on Ukraine. In contrast with the hawkish centre-right party, Wagenknecht wants a diplomatic solution to end the war and opposes sending further weapons to Ukraine, especially the long-range Taurus missiles that Kyiv has been asking for.
The CDU does not have many coalition options if it insists on isolating the AfD. Its previous coalition consisting of the SDP and the Greens does not have sufficient seats in the parliament to form a majority. A minority government featuring CDU and SPD is also out of the question, as neither the BSW, nor the AfD would lend their support to such a cabinet.
However, in an interesting turn of events, BSW’s Saxony leader Sabine Zimmermann has said that her party now prefers an alliance solely with the CDU, adding that the programmes of the two parties overlap in some areas. This, too, would be a minority government, as the two parties only jointly have 56 seats in the 120-seat parliament.
However, writes conservative media outlet Junge Freiheit, it is questionable whether the SPD would tolerate such a coalition, and it is highly doubtful that the CDU would agree to Wagenknecht’s demands of rejecting further arms deliveries to Ukraine and the deployment of U.S. long-range missiles in Germany.
Michael Kretschmer (CDU), who has been the minister president of Saxony for the past seven years, said he would do everything possible to form a stable government that acts in the interests of the people of Saxony, but did not elaborate on what he would do to achieve that.
Kretschmer has been one of a few CDU politicians who has advocated diplomatic initiatives to end the war in Ukraine, and questioned the sense of providing more weapons to Kyiv, saying: “We can no longer provide funds for arms to Ukraine, only for these weapons to be used up and not to achieve anything.”
Time is of the essence: according to the constitution, a minister-president must be elected four months after the state elections, otherwise there will be new elections. More than half of that time has already expired.
BSW has made its stance on the war in Ukraine a key issue in negotiations with the CDU and SPD not only in Saxony but in Thuringia as well, and also in Brandenburg, where it only has to make a deal with the Social Democrats to get a majority.
Talks to form a coalition in Thuringia will be just as tough as in Saxony, but, according to the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Social Democrats in Brandenburg have accommodated the requests of the BSW by stating in their joint negotiation document that they are “critical” of the planned stationing of medium-range and hypersonic missiles on German soil, and that the war in Ukraine cannot be ended by “further arms deliveries.”
