A "young striker" called Björn Höcke Thuringia CDU Chairman Mike Mohring once. He stands "fully in the juice", enthused the AfD country chief. 2014 was when Mohring and Höcke played with one thought after the state election: Mohring considered with votes from the AfD and some betrayed Social Democrats to be elected head of government - thus preventing Germany's first Left Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow.
Mohring tried everything to become head of government. Somehow.
Five years later, the CDU leader in Erfurt is now performing a very similar drama:
- First, Mohring revealed whether he is working with the left.
- Then he announced his goal of forming a Zimbabwean minority coalition with the SPD, FDP and Greens. And despite quite unequivocal refusals, he continues to pursue this.
- For too long, he admitted that some of his party colleagues are openly campaigning for cooperation with the AfD.
- On Wednesday, the CDU parliamentary group rejected two votes against talks with the AfD.
- But Mohring did not comment on the decisive question up to this point whether he would, in case of doubt, be elected prime minister with votes from the AFD.
Tacheles finally arrived last night. Mohring put down a political emergency brake via "Bild". "There will be no choice that I do not exclude in advance: I do not want the votes of AfD politicians! There are no gray areas for me on this issue," he said.
The poor performance in Thuringia with simultaneous AfD success has caused great unrest in the entire CDU. The party leadership in Berlin is trying with all its might to defend the political firewall to the right-wing populists. But the eastern associations are seething.
The youngest and strongest expression of this effort was the SPIEGEL guest post by CDU Secretary General Paul Ziemiak on Wednesday: In the relationship between the Union and the AfD "there can only be a clear edge and sharpest demarcation", writes Ziemiak. Höcke calls him a "Nazi", the AfD is "on the way to NPD 2.0". Blue turns brown.
In addition, Ziemiak called the proposal by the Thuringian CDU base for talks with the AfD as "crazy". In turn, Mohring responded: "I defend myself against this disrespectful statement," he defended his party colleagues. The head of the country is under pressure, doubts grow on him. At the election to the group leader, seven out of 21 members of parliament voted against him on Wednesday.
At the same time, the deputies denied him the next election in two years - and not in five, as he tried to enforce before. Mohring wants to stick to a Zimbabwe coalition, even if hardly anybody grants chances to anyone else. "This is Mohring's attempt to save himself," says one MP after the session, which was the subject of much debate.
What is going on in Thuringia? And, more generally, what's going on with the Eastern CDU?
In almost all Eastern associations, there is now a dispute over how to keep it with the AfD. In the European elections, in the local elections, now in the three state elections in the East, they have lost votes - while the AfD celebrated successes as never before.
Parts of the CDU panic more and more in the face of a 25-percent block that has formed to the right of Christian Democracy.
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- In Saxony-Anhalt, two deputy parliamentary group leaders advised in a strategy paper in the summer, "to connect the social with the national" and eyed with an opening to the AfD.
- The Brandenburg CDU lead candidate Ingo Senftleben did not want to exclude talks with the AfD.
- And also the Saxon parliamentary group leader Christian Hartmann declared at times that a coalition with the AfD was possible.
More and more politicians at the base are trying to throw stones at the firewall that the CDU has erected against the AfD.
Vogel: "Do not drive voters into a bunker mentality"
"One should think again about dealing with the AfD," says the former Prime Minister of Thuringia, Bernhard Vogel, the SPIEGEL. "I do not want to have anything to do with the leaders and the agenda of the AfD, they are backward-looking and nationalist in that they can not be linked to the CDU." Nevertheless: "The established parties must not drive the voters into a bunker mentality from which the voters can not get out."
But that is precisely the dilemma that threatens to tear the CDU: on the one hand sharply demarcate, on the other hand, the AfD supporters do not bounce. Especially the second aspect is crucial for the East-CDU, the West-peoples are not dealing with 25-per cent blocs in the parliaments. Three Kenya coalitions will soon be in East Germany. Actually, the Greens and the SPD were the opposing camp.
Will the stone throwers in the East manage to smash the firewall in the end?
When CDU leader Kramp-Karrenbauer invited some CDU politicians from Saxony to the party headquarters in Berlin in August, the dilemma became obvious. Previously, these had expressed in letters their displeasure with the party leadership. As several participants report, the conversation went well. Only at one point was the mood cool: at the AFD.
In several Saxon municipal parliaments, the CDU had given the impression that they had worked together with the AfD. Kramp-Karrenbauer made it clear how to understand the party congress, which excludes any cooperation with the right-wing populists, and referred to a communal example from Rhineland-Palatinate, where a joint faction of CDU and AfD led to an exclusion. Although the Saxons gave their party leader right, a coalition is unthinkable. At the same time they made it clear that they were secret ballots.
So you went apart in the contradiction.
