Prime Minister election of Saxony-Anhalt: CDU MP Heuer wants to remain seated

Guido Heuer goes against the line of his CDU parliamentary group. If AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund wants to be elected Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt in December, the Union MPs plan to leave the plenary hall as a unit. It should be visible to all the world: If Siegmund gets votes outside the AfD faction, then they do not come from the CDU. This year, he announced on Thursday on the new-right propaganda portal Nius that he would not be taking part: “I will not leave the hall.”

In order to become Prime Minister, three more MPs must vote for Siegmund than the AfD parliamentary group has members. So far it is unclear where the additional votes will come from. The BSW asserts that it will not elect an AfD prime minister. Siegmund himself had emphasized several times that there were discussions with individual members of the CDU. But if they weren't in the room at all, Siegmund's plan would have been over.

The fact that some CDU MPs are fundamentally prepared to elect AfD members to important positions became apparent at the beginning of October, when state parliament presidential candidate Tobias Rausch received four more votes than expected. There was speculation nationwide about where the additional votes for the extreme right came from. When asked by taz, 8 of the 15 CDU MPs declared that they had abstained - although there were only five abstentions in the vote.

Guido Heuer was among those who declared their abstention from the election of Rausch. And this year, when the CDU parliamentary group voted internally last week on whether MPs should leave the hall when the Prime Minister was elected, he abstained again this year. The other 14 CDU parliamentary group members voted in favor, only Heuer opted out.

“I myself had rumblings in my stomach,” he explains to Nius a week later. He abstained and called for a legal review. According to information from the taz, this test is currently ongoing and the result is pending. This year, he has already decided, he explains in the interview: "There is also an opinion from the population. I myself have come to the decision that I will not leave the hall."

From 2022, Heuer was parliamentary group leader of the CDU in Saxony-Anhalt. In the state elections he lost his direct mandate to the AfD, but won through the list. He would have liked to remain group leader. However, Sven Schulze, the acting Prime Minister and CDU state chairman, ran against him in a vote. With 8 votes to 7, Schulze won by a very narrow margin. CDU circles say that Heuer sees this as a personal defeat and primarily wants to harm Schulze.

The group leadership did not want to comment on the fact that Heuer openly announced that he would act against the party line. Heuer also left questions from the taz unanswered on Thursday. In an interview with the right-wing propaganda portal, he also left it open whether he voted for Rausch or would vote for Siegmund. He does not declare that there will be secret elections. But he knows what he has to do as a “convinced Christian Democrat”.

At least he said clearly that the CDU would not support an AfD government because the political differences were too great for that. For specific projects, however, he advocates that the CDU should also accept any approval from the AfD. In Saxony-Anhalt there is “no majority for the so-called political center”.

Heuer is also alluding to the BSW, which has entered the state parliament with 5 members. Shortly afterwards, the party began to talk to the AfD about possible government projects and also openly elected the AfD state parliament president Rausch. Nevertheless, the BSW MPs continue to assert that they would not elect Siegmund as Prime Minister.

The BSW federal executive board reiterates this line in its key proposal for the federal party conference at the end of November in Dresden, which was approved a few days ago. It says that due to differences in “central political positions,” a coalition with the AfD is out of the question. As an example, the application states that Siegmund supports arms production in Saxony-Anhalt because the AfD will later need weapons for the “remigration and deportation offensive”.