CDU/CSU

This led to criticism from national members of the SPD.

There has long been an agreement among the largest historical parties, the SPD and CDU-CSU, to not support AFD.

CSO leader Markus Söder called on CDU members who voted for Rausch to resign, while Sachs and CDU leaders stood firm in their position that there were no defections from their group.

Implications This is the first time that AfD will lead a state.

And I said, you're establishing a fascist party in Germany.

The wall used to be CDU, CSU.

Now it will go much more to the right.

By the way, one of the people who heard me in the Kanzleramt met me a year and a half ago, and he said, I'm sorry to say you were right.

One case that's interesting is this German YouTuber Rezo.

A few years back, he had this viral video where he was criticizing the Central Conservative Party, the CDU-CSU.

And there was a researcher who was able to show that that led to a decrease in the vote share in following EU parliamentary election.

So that evidence, however, is just accumulating now.

Instead of addressing the demands of young people, it is mobilising the security apparatus and whipping up hysteria over allegedly impending riots.

Alexander Throm, the domestic policy spokesman for the Christian Democratic Union, Christian Social Union, CDU-CSU parliamentary group, warned the rhenisher post that the danger must be taken seriously that the protest could be hijacked by left-wing extremist forces sections of the militant milieu and criminals he told the handelsblatt that scenes like those in france must be prevented at all costs claiming that a sinister alliance was forming particularly in berlin Social Democratic Party SPD interior policy spokesman Sebastian Feidler declared that violent protests had no legitimacy whatsoever.

He praised the early, quote, extremely professional preparations by the security authorities and called for monitoring who was, quote, fuelling the situation online.

The Berlin Young Union, the youth organisation of the CDU, even appealed to the Bundeswehr for administrative assistance in a social media post demanding, quote, the planned student protests must be prevented, end of quote.

Doch der zweite Grund ist politischer Natur.

Es sind die unausgesetzten und teilweise extrem persönlichen Vorwürfe, die ihr von der Union gemacht worden sind.

Der CDU-Bundestagsabgeordnete Christian von Stetten ist Vorsitzender des Parlamentskreises Mittelstand der Unionsfraktion.

Im September erklärte er gegenüber der Bild-Zeitung, die Ministerin sei nicht länger tragbar.

Er warf ihr vor, seit Monaten notwendige Reformen zu blockieren und bestritt ihre politische Handlungsfähigkeit.

Das Kanzleramt hat diese Darstellung nicht dementiert.

Bewiesen ist der Vorgang damit nicht, aber es gibt gute Gründe, den Bericht ernst zu nehmen.

Daneben existieren weitere teilweise drastische Vorwürfe gegen Bas von Seiten mehrerer Unionspolitiker.

So they're being forced to negotiate with other parties, which they like to announce they would never do, to form a coalition government.

The two dominant parties, the CDU, CSU, Christian Democratic Union, Social Union, and the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, If they're going to make things work, they're going to have to work with the conservative main party, which has vowed never to work with AFG.

So they've got a real challenge cut out for them if they're going to govern effectively in that state.

The AFG is a relatively new party, but it has been growing very, very rapidly.

An average of current opinion polls in Germany shows how hard it is to construct a workable centrist coalition.

The AfD is the most popular party with some twenty-eight percent support, followed by the CDU-CSU with nineteen point eight percent.

The Greens have fifteen percent, and the Social Democrats have only thirteen point one percent, barely ahead of Die Linke with eleven point three percent.

Both mainstream parties are divided internally about how to proceed.

We're talking about Germany's future role in NATO security, and joining me today is member of parliament, Peter Beyer, who is a member of the German Bundestag, uh, where he represents North West Rhine-Westphalia.

Uh, and from mid 2022 to 2025, he was also the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, investigating the entire period of German involvement in Afghanistan, and he also currently is the chair of the subcommittee on crisis prevention and strategic foresight.

It's good to have you here in our offices in Philadelphia.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Well, it's hard to qualify the current government.

It's what they call a grand coalition between the mainstream Conservative Party and the Social Democratic Party, but led by the Conservative Party.

What's there? Because

they've... said some stuff about, oh, yeah, no, we are going to reduce immigration levels, and we are going to sort of speak to these concerns.

I mean, we now have mountains, mountains of empirical evidence and libraries full of academic studies on what happens when mainstream parties adopt far-right frameworks like this, right? When they adopt these positions, when they adopt these frameworks, it only ever helps the far-right for, I mean, the simple reason that, A, people understand this is mostly just tactics, right? Okay, so you're telling me now you're adopting this position, but...

I don't trust you, right? And B, you're basically sort of confirming that the far right is correct, right? You're constantly telling people they are correct to say, you know, immigrants are bad and immigrants are a threat.

So why would people then go vote for, you know, the German mainstream conservative party or the social democratic party? If you tell them the AFD is correct about this issue, they will go vote for the AFD.

So over time, the entire discourse just shifts to the right and it never helps mainstream parties.