The double prohibition
Turmoil in Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has gotten worse since my last post, with the party’s chairwoman, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (or AKK), announcing her resignation on Monday. Last week, the CDU’s members in the Thuringia state legislature voted with the far-right AfD and pro-business FDP to elect Thomas Kemmerich as minister-president to lead the state. Although Kemmerich was forced to announce his resignation a day later, this was the first time since 1945 a state-level leader had been elected with votes of a far-right party and represented a further normalization of the far right’s political project. AKK is taking the fall for failing to prevent this, i.e., for failing to enforce the CDU’s national resolution against any cooperation with the far right. With AKK’s departure as party leader (she continues as defense minister), the question of a successor to Angela Merkel, who has said she will not be a candidate in the next elections (which have to be held in 2021 at the latest), is now completely open.
Another thing that is now completely open is the fighting between the more pragmatic, traditional part of the CDU and the party’s right wing. This fight took the form of attacks over the past few days by the moderates against the “Values Union” (Werteunion). The Values Union is a small group that has been trying to push the CDU to the right. They supported former CDU caucus leader and investment banker Friedrich Merz against AKK in the leadership race at the party convention in 2018, and never really stopped hoping that Merz would make a comeback after AKK very narrowly defeated him at that convention. Now, some fairly major old-line CDU leaders like Ruprecht Polenz and Elmar Brok are blaming the Values Union for the mess in Thuringia and even calling for the group to be kicked out of the party. (Technically, it is not, as a group, in the party; it’s just a separate club. So the party can’t really kick out the Values Union, although it is possible to kick out individual members.)
There is actual content to this fight — it is not just about personalities and factions trying to gain control over a party. While I am designating the left side in the debate as the traditionalists, the Values Union would take issue with that and claim that they are the ones who represent the roots of the CDU. They might be right if you consider only cultural and identity issues, but if you also consider economic issues, then the group that supports Merz is far more comfortable with pro-business policies than the original founders of the more consensus-oriented Rhineland capitalism would probably have been. That’s why one of the groups in the CDU that has been most sharply critical of the Values Union this week is the CDA, which is the labor wing of the party. The CDA leader, Karl-Josef Laumann, said: “The CDU in Thuringia has repeated the historic mistake of the Center Party,” referring to the March 1933 vote by the CDU’s precursor for the Enabling Law that allowed Hitler to establish a dictatorship.
Those are strong words, and they give you some sense of how deeply what happened in Thuringia last week is shaking German politics.
It is not clear to me that the Values Union played the key role in the Thuringia drama that these critics seem to imply. The national leader of the group, Alexander Mitsch, told me back in September that he supported the CDU ban on working with the AfD and condemned in particular the Thuringia AfD, which is led by the most extreme figure in that party, in no uncertain terms. Mitsch has continued to reiterate this position during the current controversy. But while maintaining its distance from the AfD, the Values Union clearly believes the CDU must take more conservative positions, meaning positions closer to those of the AfD. Whether Mitsch and his friends are naive or cynical seems to me a matter for debate. But they have embarked on a dangerous game.
The latest poll from Thuringia shows voters punishing the CDU for its flirtation with the far right and rewarding the Left Party, which now has the support of 39% of the voters. With the Social Democrats (SPD) at 10% and the Greens at 5%, there is a clear majority for a continuation of the red-red-green coalition that was running the state before the elections on October 27. However, those parties only received a combined 44% at the last elections. The AfD’s support has held steady at 24%, while the CDU has dropped to 13%, after receiving 21.7% in October.
Of course, the immediate cause of this mess has been the CDU’s insistence on maintaining a double prohibition against coalitions with the AfD on the right or with the Left Party on the left. It was obvious after the October 27 election that there was no mathematical way to maintain this position because there was no coalition government possible in the Thuringia legislature that could exclude the CDU and both the far right and far left. The pragmatic move would have been to make some kind of arrangement with the Left Party — if not a coalition, then some form of toleration. In fact, the CDU leader in Thuringia, Mike Mohring, made some moves in this direction, which was also supported by the CDU leader in neighboring Saxony, Michael Kretschmer. But the federal CDU and portions of “the base” in the state slapped this idea down.
This double prohibition is not going to be less of a problem going forward. Karin Prien, who is the minister of education in the CDU-led government in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, argued against the policy. “I’m a convinced anti-Communist,” said Prien. “But to equate a respectable minister-president like [Left Party member] Bodo Ramelow [who governed Thuringia until the last elections] with a Mr. Hoecke [the extremist leader of the Thuringia AfD] is a political and historical distortion. Hoecke is the worst of the worst in the AfD; he wants a society that is closer to the Nazis than to the [postwar] federal republic.”
More CDU figures are bound to follow Prien. But some unknown number of voters and politicians in the CDU simply won’t agree — some of them will choose the far right over any cooperation with democratic socialism. How large that group will be is one of the most important questions in European politics today.
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