Neck and Neck: AfD Surges as CDU Support Plummets After Selling Out to Socialists

At this point, all the AfD has to do is sit back and watch the CDU and SPD reveal their anti-democratic stance more and more. They'll be a shoo-in for the next election.

From The European Conservative

By Zoltán Kottász

The growing disillusionment within the German centre-right party has led district associations to call for a binding membership vote on the coalition agreement.

Only six weeks have passed since the German national elections, and the winner, the center-right CDU/CSU alliance, is already feeling the wrath of its voters—even before it has formed a government.

According to the latest opinion polls, released over the weekend, the alliance has lost a considerable amount of its support, dropping from the 28.5% it received on election day to 24%.

To add insult to injury, the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now neck and neck with the CDU/CSU: its support of 24% is the party’s highest-ever polling number, reflecting a 3.2-point increase compared to the AfD’s election performance.

As Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the anti-globalist party put it: the voters “do not want another left-wing government” in which the CDU/CSU allow the policies of the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens to be incorporated.

According to Hermann Binkert, the leader of the polling institute Insa, a winning party has never experienced such a loss of trust between the day of the election and the formation of the government.

The CDU/CSU is in talks to form a government with the SPD, and Friedrich Merz, Germany’s likely next chancellor and leader of the CDU, has already given in to the demands of the left-wing parties and broken many of his promises.

Before the election, he promised not to take on more debt for Germany and vowed to turn back illegal migrants at the border.

Instead, he has sought the support of both the SPD and the Greens to pass legislation that allows a massive €1 trillion debt to boost spending on defence and infrastructure, and in return has bowed to the wishes of the Greens on climate policies.

Merz has also made a U-turn on migration, as his future coalition partners, the Social Democrats, seek to bring in 500,000 migrants a year.

Though negotiations continue on forming a coalition, it seems that the incoming government’s policies are not far removed from those of the outgoing SPD-Green-coalition.

As Richard J. Schenk, a Research Fellow at MCC Brussels, commented in his opinion piece for europeanconservative.com:

A coalition agreement that bears the SPD’s handwriting only paves the way for the AfD to replace the CDU/CSU as the strongest political force.

As we recently reported, many local CDU organisations are fuming about Merz’s stance, and many have quit the party in response.

In an open letter to Merz and CDU Secretary-General Carsten Linnemann, the local CDU association in the eastern Potsdam-Mittelmark district has called for the party leadership to hold a ballot where the members of the party can decide whether to support the upcoming coalition deal with the Social Democrats.

“Many of our members no longer feel sufficiently represented and are openly thinking about leaving the party,” they said.

A similar plea was made by Johannes Winkel, the leader of the CDU’s youth wing, Junge Union. He said that his organisation would not sign off on a coalition deal if there is no visible change in policy compared to the outgoing left-wing government.

He reminded Merz that he had been elected party leader on a platform for change. “There must be no more of the same. This is especially true of the issues that shaped the election campaign: migration, the economy, the reduction of bureaucracy,” Winkel added.