A carpet of noise from heckling from all sides, so that the speeches can hardly be understood. For a long time it has not been so heated and loud in the state parliament as in the debate about Hubert Aiwanger’s demo performance in Erding. The Greens demanded that Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) have to dismiss his deputy from the Free Voters – their request did not find a majority on Wednesday late at night. They are primarily concerned with Aiwanger’s statement in Erding that the point had been reached “where the silent majority in the country finally has to take back democracy.” As if that were abolished in 2023, and coming from an elected Deputy Prime Minister.
In fact, the Greens seem to have been looking for a campaign hit for some time. All the hard work of their deputies on specialist issues, Bavaria’s meager balance sheet in energy policy, the many committees of inquiry, so far nothing has caught on. Now they apparently want to stylize the state elections in October as a vote on “a government with decency, respect and the dignity of democracy.”
That’s what top candidate Katharina Schulze said. Aiwanger’s statements are a “textbook description of a pure right-wing populist and intellectual arsonist”, he incites people “against our parliamentary democracy”, which is reminiscent of Donald Trump and the AfD. Söder must not allow members of the state government to “cross red lines”. Thomas Gehring (Greens) said that Aiwanger had not apologized despite criticism and inquiries, “this sentence didn’t somehow slip out of his mouth”. So the line of argument stands.
And then comes Winfried Kretschmann, digs juicy into the Bavarian election campaign topic. The Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Germany’s most successful Green Party, is a guest on “Markus Lanz” on ZDF. In the broadcast, just minutes after the night’s hustle and bustle in the Bavarian state parliament, he said that the sentence in Erding was undoubtedly “nonsense,” but that it was “a different caliber, Mr. Aiwanger, than some dangerous populists are now.” And anyway, there is a certain “Bavarian deduction, Bavarian folklore and so on”, so mildness. “You don’t have to jazz up now.”
The journalist Eva Quadbeck, on the other hand, spoke of Aiwanger as a “pocket trump”. As a precaution, the editors had put videos from Erding behind the topic block on the ex-US president. Also recordings of Söder’s speech at the demo, who believed there that the country “is being re-educated all day long by a few Green officials”. Nothing that would shake Kretschmann. With Söder it is “campaign talk, you can say that, it’s just allowed”. He takes the danger of a mood that one is not in a democracy “seriously”: But now he does not “draw a line from Trump to Aiwanger”.