Before the upcoming coalition negotiations in Saxony‑Anhalt following the state election, Brandenburg CDU Member of the Bundestag Saskia Ludwig said she is open to involving AfD votes. When asked on the Spiegel’s “Spitzengespräch” whether a CDU minority government should rely on AfD support, she replied, “If you put forward good, sensible proposals that benefit the state, you have to use the votes of those who carry the electorate’s mandates”.
Ludwig added that a voter mandate must be taken seriously. “If it ends up being a minority government, it should remain a minority government when other options are not possible” she said.
She also questioned the “firewall” (Brandmauer) that CDU leader Friedrich Merz affirmed at the party conference. “If fifty percent or more of the electorate votes centre‑right, there must also be centre‑right politics” Ludwig argued.
According to her, the AfD’s success is partly a result of a previous exclusion strategy. “Democracy means balancing, not excluding. What we see is the outcome of an exclusion strategy” she said. Ludwig considers the firewall counter‑productive, describing the debate over it as “wrong”. For her, the firewall is to blame for the growing percentages, and it benefits both the AfD and the left.
In contrast, the Left’s leader Jan van Aken warned against further normalisation of the AfD. “The more we normalise the AfD, pretending it is a normal democratic party, the greater the danger to democracy becomes” he said. He described the AfD as a party that “tries to destroy democracy using democratic means”.
Drawing on U.S. experience, van Aken noted that many Democrats have underestimated the danger for too long. “If in two years we have the AfD at the levers of power, it will wake people up just as the people in Minneapolis are waking up now; that is a big danger”.
