What Friedrich Merz finally has to learn from East Germany

No glasses of a glasses have appeared at Dormagen yet and no problem bear from Italy has immigrated. Not even a false Löwin was spotted in the Märkische Savanne.

But the summer hole is already there. It absorbs everything that just seemed to us journalistically and seemed important to us, the parliamentary scandal, the party -political battles and the dirty chants of the AfD. It is now much more existential how much the wind on Rügen blows how much the measure in Chiemgau costs and how full the beach is in Mallorca.

After the summer hole had paused in the state election campaign last year, the entire political and media capital bubble and its excitement swallows at an impressive pace. Even for Friedrich Merz, the vacation will soon begin, waiting for safety for Bavaria to go on vacation. After all, a chancellor never knows what the associated prime minister does.

Unfortunately, the defect of a summer hole is that it cannot digest everything. Because what is actually large and important, including the war, crisis and climate scalamities, reliably spits out again after the holidays.

And yes, sorry, including the judge’s election described in this way.

Therefore, it might be better if the Chancellor did not recover from the SPD at the inevitable Tegernsee, but to some water in Lusatia, in the Vogtland or in the Uckermark. On the one hand, as already complained elsewhere, he has not entered an East German area since taking office. On the other hand, he also finds everything about minority governments, parliamentary pats situations and blocking minorities – and about the enormous adversities that are associated with it.

In Saxony, Merz could be told by his CDU deputy Michael Kretschmer how he decided to use the Left Party. In Thuringia, Presidium member Mario Voigt would tell him that the judge and public prosecutor committees have not been filled for months because the AfD blocks the necessary two-thirds majority. And in Brandenburg, the Social Democrat Dietmar Woidke should tell him how Sahra Wagenknecht tries to blackmail his coalition with the BSW at irregular intervals.

It would be a kind of repetition for the Chancellor. Because the prime ministers have already teased a lot. They warned him of random majorities in the Bundestag with the AfD and of being all too confident in a secret chancellor’s election. And they explained to him how incredibly complicated it becomes in a parliament if no two-thirds majority can be organized from the middle. But oh, he just didn’t hear.

Merz now seems to have at least intellectually penetrated the topic. “We have difficult majority in the German Bundestag,” he said in the ARD summer interview and predicted: “It remains difficult.” Elections with narrow majorities would “a bit of political norm in our democracy”.

But the problem is that Merz has only described the new normally, but does not act afterwards. It goes through the early development phase in which East German politics was located a few years ago, as was also the case there, there were prolonized failure and coalitions against better knowledge.

This means: The Chancellor and his parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn must finally deal seriously with what is happening in Erfurt, Dresden and Potsdam – and what may happen next year after the state elections in Magdeburg and Schwerin. One of the central teachings includes that the Union and Left Party can vote together without giving up the content and strategically necessary distance from each other. The 2018’s demarcation decision of the 2018, in which an equidist dance to the left as right, has long been overtaken by the East German reality.

That there is a big difference between extreme left-wing populism and populist right-wing extremism, whose Allensbach-Institut is something like the demoscopic court supplier of the Union. “AfD supporters differ seriously from the supporters of all other parties,” she wrote in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. 69 percent are dissatisfied with the democratic system in Germany, only 17 percent are for European integration.

According to Köcher, the supporters of the left are “completely different” and “much closer to the center parties as AfD supporters”. This also applies to institutional and system confidence.

I once called Andreas Bühl the days. He comes from Ilmenau, where I once went to school. Today he heads the CDU parliamentary group in Erfurt. We talked about the fact that voices of left or AfD are now also needed in the Bundestag to choose constitutional judges – and that its federal party can therefore not really handle it.

“The majority in the Bundestag are the way they are,” said Bühl. “Priority must have a priority that the Federal Constitutional Court is fully staffed and the Bundestag remains capable of acting in the event of amendments to the Basic Law.”

Bühl does not always make itself skillfully. Last autumn, he unnecessarily brute the election of a CDU MP as President of the Landtag, although the sole right of proposal for the post of the AfD state. It was an unsightly idea in every respect – but also one of those East German experiences from which the entire republic should teach.

The group leader knows the right -wing extremists from parliament; Björn Höcke sits in the plenary hall just a few meters from him. And just like most East Germans, he also knows the followers of the party from his neighborhood or the circle of friends. Even more: his older brother is sitting in the Bundestag for the AfD.

This is also why Bühl differentiates. As a member of the parliament, he once supported a left-wing government. And as a government parliamentary group leader, he is now organizing majorities with the voices of the left.

He knows that this is particularly incomprehensible in West Germany. That is why, he says, he says that you are still “in a more comfortable majority situation”. But: “That can also change.”

You can find all Martin Debes columns published so far .