German opposition leader sparks anger as he eases stance on far right AfD

Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats, has provoked outrage in his party by suggesting that the CDU could work together with the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) at local level.

The comments, made in a TV interview on Sunday evening, broke one of the biggest taboos in German politics: the mainstream parties’ refusal to have anything to do with the AfD, which has close links to the extreme right.

Kai Wegner, the CDU mayor of Berlin, said there could be no co-operation with a party “whose business model is hate, division and exclusion”.

Merz later responded to the furore by rowing back on his earlier comments. “Just to make it clear again, and I never said anything different: the CDU’s resolutions apply,” he wrote on Twitter. “The CDU will not co-operate with the AfD, even on the municipal level.”

The CDU is one of several parties that have created a kind of cordon sanitaire around the AfD, refusing to work with a movement whose hardline views on immigration and hostility towards Muslims have made it a byword for extremism.

But some in the CDU say privately that its “firewall” against the AfD might be hard to maintain on a long-term basis, in view of the party’s electoral success in eastern Germany.

The AfD is at present polling at 22 per cent, far ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and only four points behind the CDU. Experts say it is benefiting from widespread anger over irregular immigration, inflation and high energy costs as well as a bungled ban on new oil-and gas-fired boilers pushed by Scholz’s coalition partners, the Greens.

Last month an AfD politician was elected head of the district council of Sonneberg in the eastern state of Thuringia — a first for the party. A few days later an AfD candidate won elections for mayor in the next-door state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Speaking to public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday evening, Merz said the CDU would not co-operate with the AfD in the European, regional and national parliaments. But if the AfD won the post of mayor or head of a district council, those were “democratic elections” and “we have to accept that”.

“And of course in local councils you have to look for ways to run things together in towns, rural areas and districts,” he added.

A former president of BlackRock Germany, Merz has long irritated those on the left of his party with his conservative views. This month he said the CDU should aim to become an “Alternative for Germany — with substance”.

The ZDF interview drew a furious reaction from other CDU politicians. “Whether in a district council or the Bundestag, the radical right remains the radical right,” Yvonne Magwas, a CDU politician who is also deputy president of parliament, wrote on Twitter. “For Christian Democrats, rightwing radicals are ALWAYS the enemy!”

Christian Democrats said Merz’s comments contradicted resolutions adopted at CDU party conferences explicitly ruling out any co-operation with the AfD.

One said that anyone pleading for a rapprochement with the AfD must know that it is a party that “consciously tolerates extreme-right ideas, antisemitism and racism in its ranks”.

“What we’re seeing here is the creeping attempt to water down party resolutions after electoral successes by the extreme right,” said Tobias Hans, a former CDU prime minister of the small state of Saarland.

The AfD welcomed Merz’s comments, with leader Tino Chrupalla saying the CDU’s firewall was beginning to crumble. “In the regions and at the national level we will together tear down these walls,” he wrote in a tweet. “The citizens of this country will be the winners.”

Merz also won backing from Carsten Linnemann, the CDU’s secretary-general, who insisted there was no change to the party’s strict line on the AfD. But “say a local council is discussing a new day nursery, we can’t vote against it just because the AfD is voting for it”, he told Bild Zeitung. “We are not making ourselves dependent on the rightwing radicals.”