Saxony-Anhalt: The CDU is building its firewall in the wrong direction

On Sunday, the AfD won the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt with 39 of 97 seats, while the CDU fell from 37.1 to 17.2 percent. And even before the new state parliament was even constituted on Tuesday, it was clear what lesson the CDU was drawing from the debacle: not a sharper demarcation to the right, but to the left. Bundestag member Sepp Müller, who had already declared before the election that an AfD election victory would mean a “government mandate” for the AfD, now wants to become state leader. Ulrich Thomas, who is considered a notorious ricochet against the green-black coalition of the 2010s, is being discussed as a possible parliamentary group leader. Both, as the reporting bluntly states, “define themselves to the left – less so to the right.”

This is not a petty matter of distributing positions within the party, it is the blueprint for what will happen in Magdeburg in the next few months. The AfD has 39 seats, three short of an absolute majority in the first and second rounds. The CDU, SPD, Greens and Left together also have 39, the BSW with five seats has already announced that it will abstain in the third round of voting, in which a simple majority is sufficient. In the end, all it takes is a single vote from the democratic camp that does not vote against the AfD's top candidate Ulrich Siegmund, and the AfD will appoint the first prime minister in its history. The question of whether there are "renegades" in the CDU faction is denied by the party leadership - but the very people who now want to take the helm are those who found cooperation with the Left, the SPD and the Greens the most toxic and who posed with "buddy photos" next to AfD top candidates during the election campaign.

The pattern is not new, it is just demonstrated once again as an example: When a bourgeois party goes into analysis after an election defeat against the extreme right, it ends almost reflexively with the realization that one needs to "become more conservative again", "reconcile the national with the social" - in short: to please the extreme right instead of fighting them. The firewall that is supposedly being defended is not crumbling due to pressure from outside, it is being torn down from within, by people who profile themselves as anti-communists while remaining silent about the AfD's de facto takeover of power or making it possible through inaction.

For us as anti-fascists, the lesson from this is not new, but it is currently being confirmed again with brutal clarity: parliamentary firewalls are not protection, they are a bargaining chip that disappears exactly when it becomes inconvenient. Civil society organizations such as Miteinander e.V. or the Refugee Council in Saxony-Anhalt are already appealing to democratic parties and citizens to support them in the event of an AfD government - because they know that they cannot rely on the classe politique. This is the place where anti-fascist politics actually takes place: not in special party conferences and post-castling, but in the structures that continue to work when the institutions collapse. Anyone hoping for a weak majority of three seats in the state parliament has already lost. The resistance against an AfD government in Magdeburg will have to be organized on the streets, in the workplace and in the migrant and queer communities, not in Merz's parliamentary group meetings.

Sources
nd-aktuell.de: Sepp Müller – The hardliners are taking over in Saxony-Anhalt’s CDU
nd-aktuell.de: Saxony-Anhalt's civil society is moving closer together
Faultline: Germany wire