Saxony-Anhalt: The CDU would rather give power to the AfD than shake hands with the left

After Sunday's election debacle, the Saxony-Anhalt CDU is drawing the only lesson that suits it: don't move to the right, but close to the left. Bundestag member Sepp Müller wants to become state chairman, Ulrich Thomas could take over the faction, which has shrunk to 15 seats - both are considered hardliners, both distance themselves primarily from the Left. Guido Heuer, who previously stood for pragmatic cooperation with the Left, the SPD and the Greens and played a key role in constitutional reform against AfD attacks, is about to be replaced. His photo with AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund, which caused outrage in the election campaign, seems to be doing him less political harm than his course of cooperation with the left.

Müller's logic, formulated publicly before the election: If the AfD becomes the strongest force, but without an absolute majority, the government mandate still belongs to it. No exploration, no consultation mechanism like in Saxony or Thuringia, and certainly no coalition with the left. This is no longer a question of power arithmetic, but of principle - except that the principle is: it's better to let the extreme right rule than talk to the democratic left. The AfD has 39 of 97 seats in the new state parliament, three short of an absolute majority in the third ballot. The BSW has already announced abstention. All that is needed is a single vote from the democratic camp that does not vote against Siegmund in a secret ballot.

That is the real scandal, not the election result itself: a bourgeois party that would rather disempower itself than accept a red-red-green firewall against fascists. The “firewall to the left” was never a symmetry to the firewall against the AfD, it was always its preparation - a rhetorical trick that equates both sides in order to ultimately only keep one direction open. Those who, like Müller, make anti-communism a question of power over preventing an AfD government have long since decided who they consider to be the greater evil - and it is not Siegmund.

For civil society in Saxony-Anhalt, this is not an abstract party tactic. Associations like Miteinander e.V. and the Refugee Council have already warned before the election what an AfD government means for migrant communities, for queer people, for any structure that does not fit into the ethnic image. Youth centers like Zora in Halberstadt are already reporting fear and helplessness among those organizing themselves. This fear is not an exaggeration - it is a realistic assessment of what happens when a firmly established democratic party would rather give away its own option for power than practice anti-fascist consensus with the radical left.

Antifascist politics cannot rely on this spectacle. If the CDU tears down its firewall itself, the defense of what protection is left for those affected will remain with the very structures that Müller would prefer to keep out of state politics: trade unions, migrant self-organization, anti-fascist alliances, left-wing parties that do not duck away. The CDU's November special party conference will show how deep the shift to the right within the party already is. Anyone who is waiting for the middle class to stop the AfD has not understood the last few years.

Sources

nd-aktuell.de: In Sachsen-Anhalts CDU übernehmen die Hardliner
ZEIT: Why this CDU man could bring the AfD to power
Faultline: Germany wire