Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, spoke forcefully this Monday at the meeting of the CDU’s federal executive committee, according to information obtained by Bild. Merz expressed his dismay at the AfD’s electoral result in Saxony-Anhalt and warned of an imminent “far-right government” and a “far-right minister-president” in the eastern German state.
According to provisional results, the AfD approached an absolute majority with 43.8% of the votes, while the CDU saw its result halved compared to 2021, down to 17.2%. The regional CDU president and outgoing minister-president, Sven Schulze, acknowledged defeat shortly after the polls closed.
Bild quotes Merz’s exact words before the executive body: “We have a solid Constitution, we have all the instruments to defend it against a far-right state government, but we are experiencing a deep convulsion in our party system.”
The chancellor went further: “This shakes our party to its foundations. We cannot simply return to normal, neither I nor the federal government.”
Internal self-criticism
Merz was self-critical before the committee: “We have failed to connect emotionally with the people”. According to Bild, the CDU leader pointed out that there was a lack of “emotional support from the population” and added: “We cannot ignore it.”
The chancellor described the result as a “dramatic defeat” and a “momentous turning point for the party”.
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Call for unity
Merz called for internal cohesion: “We will only succeed if we speak openly about the problems within the leadership.” At the same time, he warned that “public statements directed against the party” harm the CDU.
Regarding the AfD, Merz was blunt: their goal is the “total destruction of the CDU,” so there can be “no cooperation” with the party. The CDU, he emphasized, is founded “on the foundations of Adenauer and Kohl.”
Abstainers mobilized
Sven Schulze, CDU’s lead candidate and outgoing minister-president, summarized before the committee a campaign he described as “extremely tough” and expressed being “deeply disappointed”: polls had predicted better results for his party.
According to Schulze, the AfD used “different mechanisms” in its campaign, with unprecedented brutality in attacks, to which the electorate “did not react” negatively. The party also managed to mobilize a large number of former abstainers. “This hurts a lot, but we have to accept it,” he concluded.
Following yesterday’s result, the political crisis deepens around Merz and his coalition government with the SPD. The result reopens the debate in Berlin about the future of the “cordon sanitaire” against the AfD and about the stability of the federal CDU-SPD coalition
