Kretschmer puts the firewall politics on notice

In eastern Germany, politics has become a test of nerves, arithmetic and, apparently, basic conversation. Michael Kretschmer, Saxony’s minister president and a CDU politician, now says openly that the reflex to avoid any contact with the AfD no longer fits the realities on the ground. The neat moral posture known as the Brandmauer may sound reassuring in party headquarters. It is less convincing when governments depend on fragile majorities and every vote has to be counted twice.

Kretschmer made his position clear in an interview with the Handelsblatt. He argued that anyone still talking about walls of exclusion has failed to read the political moment properly, and that his answer is simple: talk to anyone who is willing to talk. That does not amount to a love affair with the AfD, which would be too much to ask of German politics, but it does amount to a rejection of automatic refusal as a governing principle.

The practical setting matters. Saxony is already governed by Kretschmer through a minority government, and Mario Voigt of the CDU is doing the same in Thuringia. In Dresden, Kretschmer has set up a consultation mechanism that is open to all parliamentary groups. That is not a grand constitutional innovation, just the sort of unglamorous arrangement that keeps politics from turning into theatre by other means.

The calendar is adding pressure. State elections are due in September in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, two regions where the political mood in the east remains tense. Kretschmer’s intervention therefore lands at a moment when parties can least afford to cling to slogans that look firm on television and awkward in practice. The Brandmauer may still flatter those who prefer symbolic clarity to compromise. Governing, however, tends to punish such comforts.

Kretschmer also drew a line of his own. He said the AfD is the only parliamentary group that has from the outset declared it will not participate. In his view, the party is betting on government failure and damages the country. That is hardly an olive branch. It is, rather, a reminder that speaking with a party is not the same as trusting it, and certainly not the same as endorsing it.

Yet the larger point is difficult to miss. Minority government, especially in a fragmented eastern landscape, forces parties to deal with reality instead of posing for it. The old formula of blanket exclusion may comfort the faithful, but it does not produce majorities, nor does it make politics more stable. Kretschmer is saying, in effect, that if parties want the state to function, they had better learn to speak to each other before the electorate does the talking for them.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com