In a rare statement, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) has criticized the first joint voting of the Union and FDP with the AfD. She considers it wrong for the first time in the German Bundestag to enable a majority with the AfD’s votes, “seeing eye to eye” for the first time in a vote, as stated on her website on Thursday.
Merkel initially recalled that the head of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and CDU and CSU’s chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz, had declared in his speech on November 13, 2024, that he would agree with the SPD and the Greens to only put decisions on the Bundestag’s agenda that had been previously agreed upon, so that neither the determination of the agenda nor the voting in the Bundestag would ever result in a random or actually engineered majority with the AfD’s votes.
Merz explicitly proposed this agreement, according to the statement. “Because the latter would have liked it if they suddenly got the majorities and even with the two minority factions at the determination of the agenda. We do not want that” Merkel quoted her successor at the head of the CDU.
This broken proposal and the attitude accompanying it, were an expression of great state political responsibility, which Merkel fully supports. “I consider it wrong to no longer be bound by this proposal and, as a result, to enable a majority with the AfD’s votes for the first time in a Bundestag vote, seeing eye to eye” she stated.
Merkel called for a return to a different tone and to substantive, European law-conform proposals. “Instead, it is necessary for all democratic parties to come together, not across party lines as a tactical maneuver, but in the substance, honestly, in a moderate tone and on the basis of existing European law, to do everything to prevent such heinous attacks, like the ones in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg in recent days, from happening in the future” Merkel said.