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CDU boss Armin Laschet and Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff
Photo:
MICHAEL KAPPELER / AFP
Reiner Haseloff's victory is also a victory over the AfD.
What previously seemed so difficult for the Christian Democrats in the East, he has achieved: He has brought voters back from the AfD to the Union.
According to analyzes of the voter migration, the AfD belongs next to the SPD to the parties with the greatest voter losses to the CDU.
Haseloff succeeded in doing something amazing: Not only was he able to convince voters from the SPD and the left to vote better for the CDU, so that the AfD does not become the strongest force in the state (how realistic this danger really was, it can be debated). He even managed to convince AfD supporters of this. The AfD was only able to win a direct mandate. The right-wing party is still well represented with a good 21 percent, but it fell short of its expectations and lost almost four percent of the votes compared to the last election in Saxony-Anhalt in 2016.
Haseloff succeeded with a conservative, authentic course, also against Berlin, also in contrast to the Greens.
For the East German CDU, which has struggled to find the right way to deal with the strong AfD in recent years, Haseloff's course should be instructive and could set an example.
Haseloff did not copy the AfD, and yet he sometimes took away the issues from it.
Just a few examples are given here.
In an interview with “Welt am Sonntag” shortly before the election, he railed against gender-sensitive language: “The way this is pushed through in a missionary way annoys many people because it has nothing to do with the worlds of many people,” he said .
"In the East, self-confident women define themselves through their performance and not through the inland I."
Haseloff also positioned himself against the Corona federal emergency brake, seeing it as a major mistake by the federal government led by his own party.
Haseloff repeatedly voiced criticism of the increase in the license fee.
Even if it wasn't him, but his parliamentary group that stubbornly opposed it in the end, Haseloff himself was also not convinced of the increase and denounced undesirable developments in public broadcasting.
You don't have to share Haseloff's opinions, but neither are they right-wing.
Anyone who speaks out against the gender star is not a homophobic misogynist.
Anyone who thinks the increase in the license fee is wrong does not want to abolish public broadcasting right away - and anyone who criticizes the Corona Federal Brake as not well thought out is not a Corona denier.
One vote for a CDU with these positions is always better than any other vote for the right-wing extremist AfD Saxony-Anhalt with its racism and its ever-increasing closeness to historical fascism.
And Haseloff also stands for that: When the CDU ran the risk of voting against the license fee together with the AfD in the state parliament at the end of 2020, the Prime Minister prevented a vote in the state parliament at all.
When his Interior Minister Holger Stahlknecht pondered a minority government that would have made cooperation with the AfD more likely, the head of government threw him out of his cabinet without further ado.
Haseloff showed his backbone.
Conservative, yes. Cooperation with the extreme right to enforce conservative positions, no way. With this combination, the CDU can clearly decide for itself again in the east - and finally get votes from the AfD.
