Chancellor Friedrich Merz is embroiled in another crisis after four members of his party were accused of helping elect the first-ever parliamentary president from the far-right Alternative for Germany.
AfD’s Tobias Rausch on Tuesday was voted as Speaker of the regional assembly in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt — a post similar to the role of Speaker of the House of Commons — marking a watershed moment for the anti-immigration, pro-Russian party.
His vote tally was higher than expected, as he secured four mystery votes in the secret ballot, in addition to the expected support from a hard-left party. The result sent shockwaves through the German political establishment and triggered a frenzied search for the identity of those supporters.
Rausch has claimed that some or all of the four were members of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union. Asked if he was elected with support from members of the party, he said “yes”.
The suspicion of CDU support has piled fresh pressure on Merz, who remains committed to maintaining a “firewall” around the AfD but has faced calls from some members of his party to abandon it as the far right has surged to first place in the national polls.
The chancellor on Wednesday described the outcome of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt as a “historic rupture”, adding: “Anyone who lends their vote to the AfD is playing into the hands of extremists and destroying credibility. That is certainly incompatible with the values of my party, the CDU.”
The CDU plans to hold crisis meetings this weekend to discuss its heavy defeats in Saxony-Anhalt and in the small north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — as well as the secret support for Rausch.
The drama in Magdeburg, the Saxony-Anhalt state capital, has also deepened the tensions in the chancellor’s coalition with the Social Democrats. Merz’s vice-chancellor Lars Klingbeil, who is the SPD’s co-leader, said the CDU needed to urgently “explain how this could have happened”.
Defence minister Boris Pistorius, who joined an SPD rally against the outcome on Tuesday night, said democrats had “served as the enablers of fascists”.
Merz warned, however, against “hasty conclusions” about who had voted for whom. He suggested that members of another party might have secretly voted for the AfD to create the impression of CDU support, deepening existing tensions within the German centre-right.
“False flag operations aren’t just military; they exist in politics too,” he said.
The chancellor said there were “at least two, perhaps even three” groups in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament that were “doing everything they can to undermine cohesion in our democracy”.
Beyond the AfD, the BSW and the CDU, the three other parties in the regional assembly are the anti-capitalist Die Linke, the Green party and SPD. Merz did not specify which one he meant.
The AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, said last week that he expected to be comfortably elected as premier of Saxony-Anhalt in December after his party’s landslide victory in the state of 2mn people last month.
He said he expected to win even though his party fell short of the 42 seats needed for a majority, enabling him to form the first AfD-led government in the party’s 13-year history.
Rausch described the vote for his election as a “trial balloon” for to see if an agreement made with a “loose group” within the CDU could be trusted. He said that he expected CDU members to help bring Siegmund to power.