Analyse: Die Brandmauer ist gescheitert – drei bessere Ideen für den Umgang mit der AfD

After several weeks of successfully hiding Chancellor Friedrich Merz from the public during the Saxony-Anhalt state election campaign, Merz finally intervened this week in a remarkable manner. His two scheduled meetings were conducted behind almost sealed doors, from where a single sentence from the Chancellor leaked out: "Saxony-Anhalt should not become an experiment field for angry citizens."

Merz thus managed to create a hermetic wall between himself and the right-wing elements in Saxony-Anhalt, so hermetic that any physical spontaneous contact with anyone who does not already vote CDU was barred. The personal hermetic wall of the Chancellor is now in place. The message is clear, but is it wise? It is undoubtedly a rule of political responsibility to keep at arm's length all political forces that do not take the free-democratic basic order with the same seriousness.

And since the AfD, at the end of the 2010s, went from being an anti-Euro party of a few economists to becoming the dumping ground for right-wing nationalist and populist mobs, it can be considered exactly such a party. That is why the parties of the political center, especially the Union, adopted the hermetic wall concept. Even the chairmen of CDU and CSU in recent history acknowledged this, with Merz having even set a numerical goal: He wanted to not only exclude the AfD from government participation, but also halve it.