CDU Faces Coalition Dilemma as Far-right AfD Surges in Saxony-Anhalt Polls

With voters in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt heading to the polls on Sunday, tensions are mounting within the governing Christian Democrats over their possible coalition options. Three days before the election, Friedrich Merz’s CDU was trailing well behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) at just over 20%. Polls put the AfD as high as 43%.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. That would make the AfD by far the strongest force in the state parliament. Yet the party currently appears unlikely to win an absolute majority, leaving open the question of whether it can translate an electoral breakthrough into executive power. Its lead candidate, Ullrich Siegmund, has ruled out entering a coalition and says he wants the AfD to govern alone. The CDU, led by incumbent Minister-President Sven Schulze, is facing a dilemma of its own. One of his current coalition partners, the liberal FDP, is unlikely to clear the threshold for returning to the state parliament. The projected numbers also appear to rule out a majority coalition with the SPD and Greens. Schulze could, nevertheless, seek to form a minority government with the support of the Left Party, which is expected to emerge as the third-strongest political force. Speaking to journalists last week, Schulze said neither AfD nor Left Party ministers would have a seat at his cabinet table. The wording was notable for what it did not exclude: a CDU-led minority government tolerated by the Left from outside the coalition. Other Topics of Interest Lithuania to Launch Integrated AI Drone Defense System Lithuania announces a €5 million ($5.8 million) state contract for an integrated, AI-driven airspace surveillance system to detect and neutralize drone threats. A similar arrangement is already in place in neighbouring Thuringia, another east German region, where CDU Minister-President Mario Voigt has been governing for almost two years with a government dependent on votes from the Left Party in the state parliament. But replicating such an arrangement in Saxony-Anhalt would collide with a long-standing CDU red line. A party “incompatibility” resolution adopted at the CDU’s 2018 conference rules out cooperation with both the AfD and the Left, which has roots in the Party of Democratic Socialism, itself the successor to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). While Schulze has left a narrow path towards toleration by the Left, the CDU district executive committee in the Harz region has issued a position paper explicitly rejecting exploratory talks, coalition agreements or tolerance arrangements that would depend on Left Party support. “We are aware of the paper in question, and it was circulated as a handout at the most recent meeting of the CDU district executive committee in Harz. The district executive committee will not consider its substance until its next meeting,” CDU Secretary-General Mario Karschunke told Euractiv. Until that discussion takes place, it is explicitly a contribution to the debate, which is, of course, something every party member is entitled to make“, he added, while insisting that no position of the CDU Harz district branch or of the CDU in Saxony-Anhalt can be inferred from it. “If we started publicly commenting on every single opinion expressed within our party, we would probably have little time for anything else.” Shortly afterwards, the chairs of the Christian Democratic Employees’ Association (CDA) in Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania issued an election appeal explicitly ruling out both the AfD and the Left Party. Within the AfD, they argued, “far-right positions are socially acceptable”, and the party is “hostile to Europe and friendly towards Putin”. “Equally clearly, the Left Party, which is the successor to the SED, whose rule was responsible for a lack of freedom and suffering in the GDR and which today openly promotes antisemitism, cannot be a partner for Christian Democratic politics,” the paper stated. The appeal was also co-signed by Sepp Müller, deputy chairman of the CDU parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Müller, who hails from Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt, has repeatedly spoken out against any form of cooperation with either the AfD or the Left Party. See the original by Björn Stritzel here. Euractiv is a European news website focused on EU policies. It was founded in 1999 by the French media publisher Christophe Leclercq. The website's headquarters and central editorial staff are located in Brussels, with offices in Paris and Berlin.