A breach in the German wall against the AfD

For the first time, the ‘Brandmauer’ – the bulwark against the far-right AfD – has been breached at the highest level of a constitutional body: Tobias Rausch (35), an MP from the far-right party, was elected yesterday as President of the Landtag, the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt. The only previous instance was Hermann Göring, who was appointed president of the Reichstag during the Nazi era (until 1945). In addition to Rausch, another AfD leader, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider (from the radical wing), was also elected vice-president of the Landtag.

The election follows the state elections in the eastern state on 6 September, where the AfD made a landslide victory, doubling its share of the vote to 43.8 per cent. At the same time, the CDU, which led the state government, plummeted to 17.2 per cent, losing nearly 20 per cent of the vote. This collapse further exacerbated the decline in popularity of the federal government and of Chancellor Friedrich Merz himself. It was closely followed by further setbacks. On 20 September, elections in Mecklenburg and Berlin went very badly indeed for the CDU: in Schwerin, it fell below 5 per cent and, in an unprecedented move, was voted out of the Landtag; in Berlin, it finished second behind Die Linke. Rausch was elected with 48 votes (29 against, 5 abstentions), nine more than the AfD’s 39 seats. Sahra Wagenknecht’s red-brown BSW party, which is close to the AfD in terms of pro-Russian sympathies and migration policy, had announced that its five MPs would vote for Rausch (but not for AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund in the governor’s election in December). “It’s time to put an end to the cordons sanitaires; they belong to the past,” said Rausch. It remains to be seen where the other four votes for Rausch came from. The CDU (15 MPs) had announced it would abstain, but the suspicion of dissenting votes remains. Things are not looking up for Merz at the moment. The next state elections are scheduled for 2027; those in North Rhine-Westphalia will be crucial, as the state’s governor, Hendrik Wüst, is a contender for Merz’s position.