Breaking the ultimate taboo
It’s weird how disasters you’ve thought were coming still seem unreal when they actually happen. That’s how I felt reading the news from Germany this morning, where a state government was elected for the first time with votes from both the far-right AfD and the center-right CDU.
This is a very big deal.
It happened in the state of Thuringia, which held elections last October. (My post the day after those elections is here.)
Postwar politics in Germany is (or was) premised on maintaining the division between the far right and everyone else. That sentence is actually not meant as a critique of the AfD; it’s simply a statement of fact, one which the far right knows is true, but has always wanted to change. Their central demand is for normalization. I’ve had AfD politicians ask me before agreeing to interviews to promise that I wouldn’t refer to the party as “far right.” (I obviously did not make such a promise.) After the state elections in September and October in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia, the AfD promoted the line that it was a normal, bourgeois (“bürgerliche”) party.
The official CDU line rejects the idea that the AfD is a normal party and the national CDU has a resolution in force forbidding any cooperation at any level with the AfD. But that policy was being obeyed only grudgingly by many lower-level CDU politicians in eastern Germany. I wrote about that problem here back in November.
Now it appears that, as many observers feared, the CDU in the east considered the Left Party (which is the successor to the East German Communists) to be a greater threat than the far right. And so in the elections for minister-president, the CDU (and the FDP, a liberal party that will surely now be in crisis over this vote), instead of voting to maintain in office the incumbent from the Left Party voted with the AfD members to give a little-known FDP politician the reins of the state government.
As Martin Machowecz, one of Germany’s most knowledgeable journalists on state politics in the east, wrote today in Die Zeit: “It is the breaking of a dam. That might be a dumb expression, but it’s the only one that’s appropriate here.”
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