The turnaround was done in a rush, in less than 24 hours. And with a touch of panic, the outcry was so powerful. The president of the German conservatives of the ex-chancellor Angela Merkel closed this Monday the door which he had opened to cooperation at the local level with the extreme right.
In a country where, since the Third Reich, any cooperation with the far right has provoked hostility and rejection within the traditional parties, Friedrich Merz had seemed on Sunday evening to want to break the cordon sanitaire established against the anti-migrant formation, AfD (Alternative for Germany).
” Work together “
“If a cantonal councilor, a mayor, is elected and he belongs to the Alternative for Germany, it is natural that we have to look for ways to ensure that we continue to work together in this city”, he said, during an interview with the ZDF television channel.
The president of the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union) reacted to recent electoral successes at the local level of the AfD, which managed to elect its first mayor under its colors, as well as to take the head of a district council, the equivalent of a French departmental council. But these statements immediately provoked strong reactions in the ranks of the conservatives, in particular several heads of regional governments, because the party adopted a motion which excludes any cooperation with the extreme right.
An “undemocratic” party
Merz’s exit was all the more worrying as it came on the day of the parliamentary elections in Spain, where an alliance between the traditional right and the ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative Vox party had been considered. “The AfD only knows opposition and division,” asserted the mayor of Berlin and member of the CDU, Kai Wegner, who governs with the Social Democrats in this regional city-state.
The head of the Bavarian government, Markus Söder – chairman of the CDU’s sister party, the CSU, established in this region – for his part rejected any cooperation with the AfD “no matter at what political level”. The AfD is “undemocratic, far-right and divides our society”, he castigated on Twitter.
“The original” or “the copy”
Regional elections are scheduled in Bavaria next October. Only the AfD welcomed Merz’s opening: the CDU will be forced to lift the “ban on contact” with the AfD, the president of the far-right party, Alice Weidel, told the German daily. Suddeutsche Zeitung. From Monday morning, Friedrich Merz returned to these statements: “There will be no cooperation at the municipal level of the CDU with the AfD”, he said in a tweet.
A month before being elected to the presidency of the party in January 2022, he had also said: “with me, there will be a dike against the AfD”. After Angela Merkel’s years of centrism, however, Friedrich Merz made a right turn in the CDU. For Nils Diederich, professor at the Free University of Berlin, Merz’s exit on Sunday evening “shows how much he does not know what strategy to adopt against the AfD”. However, he notes, “a more populist attitude from the CDU will do absolutely nothing for this formation because voters will always prefer the original to the copy.”