traffic light coalition
DGB boss: AfD benefits from dispute between the governing parties
“I very much hope that the federal government will pull itself together now,” says Yasmin Fahimi, chairwoman of the German Trade Union Confederation, with a view to the AfD’s high poll numbers. photo
© Christoph Soeder/dpa
The AfD is currently experiencing a high in the polls. When it comes to the question of why, opinions differ. Yasmin Fahimi says: Political instability helps right-wing populists.
In view of the AfD poll high, DGB boss Yasmin Fahimi called on the traffic light coalition to overcome the dispute mode. “If the governing parties get at each other’s hair with every decision, there is a feeling of political instability – and the AfD benefits from that,” said the chairwoman of the German Trade Union Confederation to the editorial network Germany (RND). “I very much hope that the federal government will now pull itself together and that all factions will understand that in the end nobody wins against each other.”
Most recently, the FDP and the Greens in particular had been arguing hard about the heating law – but there had also been violent crunching in the traffic light coalition on other issues as well. Fahimi warned: “If things continue as they did recently, there is a real danger that extremists will increase in the European elections next year and lose the democratic spectrum.” Preventing such a “politically destructive development” is the duty of all democratic parties.
on par with the Social Democrats
In the ARD “Germany trend” the AfD had recently drawn level with the chancellor party SPD with 18 percent. The Insa survey published at the weekend for the “Bild am Sonntag” sees the party, which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies as a suspected right-wing extremist, at 19 percent and thus also on a par with the SPD.
The high AfD values had triggered a controversial debate about the causes. Politicians, especially from the Union and the Greens, blamed each other over the weekend. The Bundestag Vice-President Yvonne Magwas from the CDU warned her own party to renounce populism: “As a Union, we are well advised to fulfill our opposition task in a constructively critical manner. Without shrill tones, without populist wording,” she told RND. The traffic light, for its part, must govern better and “would do well to adopt our proposals more often instead of insulting the Union,” she demanded.
The political scientist Steffen Kailitz told the “Stern” that most voters continue to mobilize the AfD with the issue of migration. “The success of the AfD depends on the boom in its central issue: the migration issue.” Kailitz works at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism at the TU Dresden.