Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister-President, Gordon Schnieder (CDU), is calling for the political loyalty of the Left Party to be thoroughly investigated. In a guest contribution to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, he stated that, alongside the AfD, the “reactionary and antisemitic Left” should be examined by the inter-state working group proposed by North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister-President, Hendrik Wüst.
The CDU politician asserted, “We cannot simply allow parties to sit in our parliaments that actively attack the state.”
Schnieder criticized the SPD and the Green Party for discussing cooperation with the Left in Berlin with “remarkable naturalness,” arguing that such an alliance would “shift a fundamental boundary.” He questioned: “Does the SPD and the Greens truly allow a party to take a leading role where antisemitism openly appears?”
He noted that the Berlin Left has visibly presented its radical side during the campaign. Schnieder insisted that those who stand at the forefront of demonstrations against the far-right “must not be silent about the reactionary and openly antisemitic extreme left.” In his view, when fighting against antisemitism, “there can be no political discount. The ‘Never again’ from our history does not apply only when it is politically convenient.”
Schnieder insists that mainstream parties must not form a majority alongside extremists: “Not with far-left antisemites. Just as not with right-wing enemies of humanity.” He expressed disbelief over the fact that the President of the AfD parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt was elected using votes outside the AfD and BSW affiliations. This indirectly criticized the CDU leadership in Saxony-Anhalt, which had called for abstention in the election of the AfD politician Tobias Rausch. Schnieder concluded that “we need a clear stance and a clear, decisive no to extremists.”
However, he observed that currently, “only the CDU seems ready to defend the political center equally against extremists and populists from both the right and the left.” In his piece, Schnieder called for a “clear moral consensus” from the SPD and Greens, stating that the only parties that stand for a consistent democratic standard toward every form of extremism are those that remain upright.
