The CDU leadership is gathering today for a two-day strategic retreat, principally to debate how to handle the far-right and anti-LGBTQ AfD ahead of the five state elections scheduled for next year. In advance of the talks, party leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has branded the AfD the “main opponent” for the upcoming campaigns and made clear that under his leadership there will be no collaboration with the party. Ahead of the retreat, calls for softening the hard line against the AfD grew louder.
The Starting Point: AfD Has Caught Up With the Union
When Merz first sought the party chair in 2018, he wrote these lines on the online platform Twitter, today X: “We can again reach up to 40% and halve the AfD. It’s possible! But we must create the conditions ourselves. That is our task.” At the time, the AfD had just re-entered the Bundestag and was polling at roughly 14 percent.
What happened instead is the opposite of the goal Merz had set for his party. The AfD has nearly doubled its nationwide polling, and today it sits roughly on par with the CDU/CSU at about 25 to 27 percent. In Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where new state parliaments will be elected next year, the AfD is already polling around 40 percent and is by far the strongest party in those states.
In the three other states holding elections in 2026—Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Berlin—the AfD still trails the CDU by a wide margin. A small glimmer of hope for Merz: in the local elections in his home state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the AfD did rise sharply but did not emerge as the strongest party in any city or county.
The Boss’s Declaration: No Cooperation
The CDU adopted a resolution at its Hamburg party congress in December 2018 stating: “The CDU of Germany rejects coalitions and similar forms of cooperation with both The Left and the Alternative for Germany.” Yet questions about the so-called firewall against the AfD surfaced during the federal election campaign when Merz, then an opposition leader, shepherded a migration resolution through the parliament with AfD votes.
Before the retreat, however, he made it clear that there will be no cooperation with the AfD if he remains party chairman. But that does not mean the party cannot submit motions in the Bundestag that the AfD might support. “If we believe something is right, we must not become dependent on the AfD,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
The Strategy: Substantive Debate Instead of Prohibition
Merz intends to center the upcoming year’s campaigns on a direct confrontation with the AfD as the main adversary. “We differ from the AfD in all the core beliefs that matter,” he says. “And therefore the battle of opinion with the AfD, and the future campaigns in Germany, will likely revolve entirely around the question: them or us.”
The chancellor aims to challenge the AfD on substance. “We must offer voters in Germany a solid alternative so that they do not even consider voting for that party again in the next election.” Merz is skeptical of the SPD’s push to ban the AfD before the Federal Constitutional Court, arguing the legal hurdles are extremely high. “I have little appetite for using such a tool.”
The Doubters: “Disenchantment Cannot Be Achieved by Boycott”
Several East German CDU politicians argued before the presidium retreat for a different approach to the AfD. For Brandenburg MP Saskia Ludwig, that means conceding democratic rights such as committee chairs and vice presidencies to AfD lawmakers—rights that exist in the states, she told Bild.
Also voicing support for loosening the so-called firewall to the AfD were once-influential Union politicians, including former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber and former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU). “Disenchantment cannot be achieved through boycott,” Guttenberg told Stern.
The Coalition Partner: “This Must Be Stopped Urgently”
SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil expects the CDU leadership to push back against such statements. “I expect everyone in the Union who bears responsibility to make it very clear: there is absolutely no form of cooperation with the AfD, neither at the federal level nor in the states,” the vice-chancellor told Bild am Sonntag. “That stance was a prerequisite for our entering the federal government.”
He stressed that he has no doubt Chancellor Merz would reject any future cooperation with the AfD, but he acknowledged that there are others in the CDU who are attempting to soften this clear boundary. “That must be stopped urgently.”
