Something very important happened in Sachsen-Anhalt yesterday.
You’ll remember that last month, Sachsen-Anhalt elected a new Landtag, and Alternative für Deutschland received 43.8% of the vote – enough for 39 of 83 parliamentary seats. That is not quite a majority, but it is close enough to make the firewall against the AfD unworkable. Afterwards the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which has five seats, entered talks with the AfD. Thirty-nine plus five is 44, which you will note is a majority of 83. Lead AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund has announced that he plans to be elected Minister President, or premier, of Sachsen-Anhalt in September, at which point he will form the first-ever AfD state government.
Yesterday the new Landtag held their inaugural meeting, the primary order of business being to elect a Landtag President. Landtag Presidents run parliamentary meetings, administer parliamentary business and act as the body’s official representative. They have little explicit power but great symbolic significance, which would be why all the high-minded defenders of the firewall against the AfD have worked very hard to keep Landtag presidencies out of AfD hands. Of course, the cartel parties no longer have the votes to do much of anything in Sachsen-Anhalt, and it was a foregone conclusion that the AfD would succeed in placing their first Landtag president ever – in the guise of an auto mechanic and real estate agent named Tobias Rausch. The BSW had pledged to support Rausch’s candidacy, and as I said above 39 AfD votes plus 5 BSW votes is 44 votes, which is enough.
Yesterday, however, Rausch did not just get 44 votes. Instead he got 48 votes, which means that four CDU members broke ranks and pissed on the sacred firewall to help the AfD into their first Landtag presidency.
This morning in an interview with NiUS, Rausch confirmed the obvious, namely that the four additional votes came from the CDU. He further said that the Sachsen-Anhalt AfD has been in talks with these CDU defectors, and that he assumes they will also vote Siegmund into the premiership in December: “We are working in Sachsen-Anhalt to form a stable government, which will be partly supported by the BSW but also partly by the CDU.”
All of this sounds like boring parliamentary procedure, but it’s a big deal. The voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern deactivated the firewall by kicking the CDU out of the Landtag entirely, and now we learn that in Sachsen-Anhalt too the firewall is a dead letter, because over a fourth of the CDU faction there has broken ranks, not only to support an AfD Landtag President but most likely also to vote the AfD into state government. This is precisely the Union-defector scenario that I spent months predicting,1 that state CDU leadership assured us would never happen and that has the potential to take down the federal coalition, because the coalition agreement between the Union parties and the SPD makes maintaining the firewall against the AfD also at the state level a condition of cooperation between the two parties.2
After news of the Landtag vote broke yesterday, the Bundestag SPD faction marched like a perfect gaggle of lunatics to Bebelplatz in Berlin, famed site of National Socialist book burnings. They carried dumb pre-printed signs and a copy of the German Basic Law like a talisman to ward off far-right vampires. SPD Defence Minister Boris Pistorius took the microphone and said many absurd things, among them these:
What we have witnessed today is a unique breach of a taboo in parliamentary democracy, the likes of which we have not seen in this form for more than 90 years. Namely, that democrats have acted as springboards for right-wing extremists and fascists … This is a day of anger; it is a day of disappointment that democrats have apparently learnt nothing from history and are allowing history to repeat itself … Those who have allowed this to happen have betrayed the democracy of our great country.
In other words, Pistorius likened the CDU defectors in Sachsen-Anhalt to the conservatives who helped Adolf Hitler into the chancellorship in 1933. It will be interesting to see how the Social Democrats continue to govern alongside a party they are now openly accusing of being Nazi enablers.
Alas, I walked my predictions back at the last minute, because I was convinced by noises from the CDU that their decimated faction was composed of nothing but the utmost loyalists. That is obviously not the case, and it shows what a terrible position the Union finds itself in throughout the East: The Union lost 25 seats in a crushing electoral defeat on 6 September, which means they only had 15 Landtag seats to fill, and still they could not find 15 people who would not defect and support the AfD.
p. 141: “Die Koalitionspartner schließen auf allen politischen Ebenen jede Zusammenarbeit mit verfassungsfeindlichen, demokratiefeindlichen und rechtsextremen Parteien aus.” (“The coalition partners rule out any cooperation with anti-constitutional, anti-democratic and far-right parties at all political levels.”) Interestingly, the Bavarian CSU is also threatening to bring down the coalition over SPD flirtations with Die Linke in Berlin, which they claim is also a violation of this agreement.
And very shortly we will all find out if AfD can actually govern effectively or not. Rhetoric and campaigning are easy, governing is not.
A glimmer of hope for the future. Good news is always welcome.