In the district of Sonneberg in southern Thuringia, AfD candidate Robert Stuhlmann won the runoff election for the office of district administrator against CDU candidate Jürgen Köpper on Sunday. It is the first municipal top office for the right-wing party nationwide.
The CDU district chairwoman of Sonneberg, Beate Meißner, makes the federal CDU responsible for the defeat of the Union candidate. “This is not just a memo, but a full broadside – but not against the CDU district association in Sonneberg, but against the CDU at the federal level,” said Meißner of the German Press Agency. Her district association “gave everything”. She was disappointed and shocked by the outcome of the runoff. Nevertheless, she is pleased with the increased turnout. “This is democracy,” she said. At 59.6 percent, turnout was around ten percentage points higher than in the first round of voting on June 11.
The Leaders of the Left and Greens in Thuringia are appalled at the result. They also hold the CDU responsible. The election was proof that “it’s not worth it for democratic parties to try to overtake on the far right,” said state chairwoman of the Left Party, Ulrike Grosse-Röthig, on Sunday in Erfurt. That is exactly what the CDU has tried to do in the past few weeks. The Greens state spokeswoman Ann-Sophie Bohm said: “The result horrifies me.” The fact that people are obviously dissatisfied with political decisions is by no means a reason to “elect the candidate of a right-wing extremist party”. The Thuringian AfD is classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a proven right-wing extremist.
Thuringia’s SPD leader and interior minister Georg Maier sees a reason for the AfD electoral success in Sonneberg in the unstable political conditions in the Free State. “The dysfunctionality of our parliament is certainly partly responsible for the election result,” said Maier of the German Press Agency. There is not enough visible progress on many issues that concern people because the red-red-green minority government is constantly dependent on the approval of the CDU. “We’re really going in circles sometimes.”
He reacts with reluctance Mayor of Coburg Dominik Sauerteig (SPD) on the victory of the AfD in the neighboring district of Sonneberg. “I am of the opinion that it is not my place as mayor of the city of Coburg to comment negatively on the majority decision of the sovereign, namely the citizens of the district of Sonneberg, or even to scold the voters,” Sauerteig wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday evening . When it comes to the joint issues of the city of Coburg and the district of Sonneberg, “I will take responsibility for the citizens of the region from Mr. Stuhlmann,” emphasized Sauerteig. “Local politics and the concrete solving of tasks in practice on site does not work with an exclusive course of being opposed and pointing to Berlin or Erfurt.”
Representatives of Judaism and science expressed concern about the election result. The voters of the AfD in the district of Sonneberg have, according to the former President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, “with democratic means” set an exclamation point against democracy. She no longer speaks of a dam bursting, that would devalue the word, Knobloch said: “The danger to the Jewish community and other minorities has long been real.” Many are partly responsible for this result, Knobloch said. “But above all, the local people at the ballot box made this dangerous decision.”
The President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, emphasized that not every AfD voter has right-wing extremist sentiments. “But the party whose candidate you elected is a right-wing extremist according to the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution” and the election of an AfD candidate to an executive office shakes him. The International Auschwitz Committee spoke of a “sad day for the district of Sonneberg, for Germany and for democracy”.
Extremism researcher Matthias Quent spoke to the editorial network Germany (RND) of a symbolic value of the election victory of nationwide importance: “The real design options of a district administrator in a district with 54,000 inhabitants are limited, but this election victory gives the AfD a central position for the attack on the state and federal politics.” Stuhlmann’s election is a “confirmation for Björn Höcke’s extreme right-wing radicalization course. It is also a starting point for a normalization and legitimization of cooperation between AfD and CDU, which will most likely follow,” said the Thuringian-born researcher.
The one from Thuringia Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckardt told the RND: “The AfD has a declared goal, they want to damage our democracy.” The election should not be labeled as a protest election. “I am convinced that people do not vote for the AfD despite their positions, but precisely because of these attitudes.” All democratic parties have a responsibility not to contribute further to normalization. “Anyone who rhetorically blinks to the right shouldn’t be surprised if people actually turn right during elections,” says Göring-Eckardt.
The party leader of the left, Martin Schirdewan, described the election result as an “alarm signal for democracy”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/. “We must now think very carefully about how democracy can be strengthened at this point,” said Schirdewan on Monday on “Morning Magazine”. It is also about how the experience of the East Germans can now be fed back into the political debate so that they “don’t turn to the AfD in frustration, but to democratic parties.”