(Bloomberg) — Thomas Kemmerich stood in the state legislature on Wednesday to accept the traditional floral tributes from lawmakers after his election as premier of Thuringia in eastern Germany.
But after his unprecedented coup in winning support from both Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the far-right Alternative for Germany, the caucus leader of the biggest party was in no mood for formalities. Susanne Hennig-Wellsow from the former communists of The Left tossed her bouquet at Kemmerich’s feet and walked off.
As the storm of his appointment broke over German politics, Kemmerich, from the liberal Free Democrats, found that congratulations were in short order all around.
Chancellor Merkel called his election “unforgivable,” his national party leader Christian Lindner showed up to read him the riot act, and barely 24 hours later he was forced to announce he would step down.
The real winner was the AfD.
As the Berlin establishment scrambled to reverse his appointment, Merkel called for a fresh state election. With polls signaling a drubbing for the CDU, party chief Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer tried to walk it back. Lindner was hauled in by the FDP leadership to face a confidence vote. The instigators sat back and reveled in the chaos.
“The AfD is the most relaxed party in Germany at the moment,” co-Chairman Joerg Meuthen said in a telephone interview. “The fear of the other parties is justified, because they’re losing ground with every election.”
Founded in 2013 in protest over Merkel’s support for bailing out Greece, the party’s support surged in the wake of the refugee crisis in 2015. In the last election, the AfD emerged as the largest opposition group and recent polls show it in third place behind the CDU and the Greens and ahead of the embattled Social Democrats.
With a strong power base in the former communist East, the AfD has become a serious threat by appealing to Germans disaffected by Merkel’s globalist approach and unsettled by the technology changes that threaten thousands of jobs.
By successfully helping to appoint a state leader for the first time, the party outmaneuvered Germany’s old guard. But the CDU should still have seen it coming.
“The AfD has a very disruptive strategy,” said Josef Janning, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “They are trying to expose the weakness of mainstream politics.”
At a party convention at the end of November, the AfD made it clear that it wanted a seat at the decision-making table, even if all other parties still refuse to cooperate with it. The anti-establishment group vowed to modify its divisive, nationalist rhetoric to make itself a more palatable partner — describing itself as “bürgerlich,” which has connotations of being close to the people.
Tino Chrupalla, a 44-year-old tradesman from the eastern state of Saxony, was elected as co-chairman to help broaden the party’s appeal alongside Meuthen, an economics professor from affluent Baden-Wuerttemberg in the west.
Test Case
Thuringia was the first opportunity to put its new strategy to the test: The state parliament was fragmented after an AfD surge in October’s election and the coalition around the Left’s Bodo Ramelow no longer had a majority.
The incumbent candidate was still expected to squeak through with a simple majority in the third round of voting.
The CDU, which didn’t field its own contender, was backing Kemmerich along with the FDP, while the AfD, as always, was on its own. But when the 22 AfD lawmakers pressed their buttons in the final round they ditched their own candidate and swung behind Kemmerich.
The tacit alliance between Merkel’s party and the far right sent shudders through the circles of power — the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, is a bona-fide fascist according to a German court ruling.
“We will never tolerate that the AfD has influence on political decisions: no cooperations, no coalitions, no agreements, no joint proposals, nothing,” CDU Deputy Chairman Armin Laschet said in an interview with broadcaster NTV. “The boundaries between the CDU and the AfD are crystal clear.”
The Long Game
The AfD is betting resistance will erode over time and as alternative alliances become increasingly difficult. There are signs that some factions in the CDU are already starting to question the official stance. On Wednesday, the AfD put the first crack in the wall keeping them from power.
With efforts underway to reverse Kemmerich’s election, the events in Thuringia also fit neatly into the AfD’s narrative that established parties are intent on clinging to power at all costs. The more the far right is blocked, the more its claims to being the voice of Germans left behind and marginalized by the mainstream are bolstered.
“We will patiently continue with our work and see what happens,” said Meuthen, likening the AfD’s position now to how the Green party was shunned in the 1980s.
Still, there’s a clear difference to the environmental movement. German politics remains haunted by memories of the Nazi era, and the extreme rhetoric of figures like Hoecke alarms many voters. A notorious figure from the hard-right nationalist wing of the party, Hoecke has made headlines by assailing Germany’s guilt complex, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame.”
Fears of right-wing extremism fuels emotions in Germany, especially in Thuringia, where the Nazis first rose to power. Hennig-Wellsow, the Left party politician who threw her congratulatory flowers on the floor, justified her slight of lawmaking peer Kemmerich, who campaigned against the AfD, by pointing to the lessons of history.
“If such a taboo is broken in a democratic parliament, I can’t just move on to business as usual. That would mean normalizing or trivializing the pact with fascism,” she said in an interview with Die Welt. “There’s no better way to send a message than to say it with flowers.”
–With assistance from Patrick Donahue and Arne Delfs.
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Reiter in Berlin at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at [email protected], Ben Sills, Tony Czuczka
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