The SPD’s Philipp Türmer, the chairman of Juso, has accused the CDU’s Friedrich Merz of using high-pressure tactics to exclude himself from potential coalitions with democratic parties. Merz has been heavily criticized since the CDU, AfD and FDP passed a resolution on Wednesday to limit migration, with nationwide protests involving over 80,000 people on Thursday.
Türmer told the Tagesspiegel on Friday, “He’s sacrificing the firewall of our democracy and pacting with Nazis to set up extremist symbols. Secondly, he’s rejecting every democratic compromise and instead opting for the method of coercion.” As a result, the AfD is celebrating, according to Türmer. The Juso chairman believes this approach has consequences for potential coalition options and warned his party and others to resist the pressure. “Neither the SPD nor other democratic parties should be coerced into submission” he said.
Türmer explicitly extended this warning to the period after the February 23 election, stating, “This applies not only to Friday but also to after the election. Whoever takes democracy seriously should not agree to this.”
Former Chancellor Merkel has also weighed in, reminding Merz of his “state political responsibility” that he had expressed in November 2024, aiming to prevent a situation where “only a single, accidental, or actually engineered majority comes with those from the AfD.”
Additionally, Michel Friedman, the former chairman of the Central Council of Jews, who was once a member of the CDU’s federal executive board, has left the party. Albrecht Weinberg, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor, returned his Federal Cross of Merit in protest of the AfD alliance, alongside the Unesco artist Luigi Toscano, who had received the award for his project “Against Forgetting” which featured over 400 Holocaust survivors and displayed the photographs in public spaces.