Right-wing populism: Four points away from the Union: AfD in a survey at 22 percent

In an Insa survey, the AfD is 22 percent nationwide and thus only four percentage points behind the Union. Insa boss Hermann Binkert told the “Bild am Sonntag”: “This is the highest value that we have ever measured for this party.” The AfD thus gained two points in the weekly survey commissioned by the newspaper.

In the surveys of other opinion research institutes, the AfD was also at 20 percent. The CDU/CSU come to 26 percent (minus 1 point) at Insa and are therefore still in first place in the favor of those surveyed. There were no changes in the survey for the other major parties: the SPD comes to 18 percent, the Greens are 14 percent, the FDP 7 percent and the left 5 percent.

Election polls are generally always subject to uncertainties. Declining party affiliations and increasingly short-term voting decisions make it difficult for opinion research institutes to weight the data collected. Insa gives a statistical margin of error of 2.9 percentage points for its latest survey. In principle, surveys only reflect the opinion at the time of the survey and are not a forecast for the outcome of the election.

Merz against party ban

The CDU chairman Friedrich Merz rejects a ban on the AfD, which was classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected right-wing extremist in March 2021. “Party bans have never led to solving a political problem,” said the CDU/CSU faction leader in the ZDF summer interview. He called a corresponding proposal by the CDU member of the Bundestag Marko Wanderwitz “an individual opinion in the Bundestag faction that we do not share”.

Merz reiterated that the Union would not cooperate with the AfD. However, he limited this to “legislatures” and “government formations”. Local politics is different from state and federal politics. If the AfD has elected a district administrator in Thuringia and a mayor in Saxony-Anhalt, then these are democratic elections. “We have to accept that. And of course the local parliaments have to look for ways to shape the city, the state and the district together.”

Baerbock calls for unity

In view of the AfD values, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called for more unity in the traffic light coalition. “In times of uncertainty like now due to the Russian war of aggression, populist parties have it ever easier. We must not make it even easier for them through months of public debates within the coalition,” said the Green politician to the newspapers of the Bayern media group.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the CDU social wing, Karl-Josef Laumann, is seeing voters becoming increasingly alienated from the political parties. In the political representation of members of parliament and management personnel, these no longer reflected the sociological strata of the population, he told Deutschlandfunk. That is a big problem. “And that has long-term consequences for the acceptance of the entire political system, including parliamentary representative democracy.” Laumann is Minister of Health in North Rhine-Westphalia and Federal Chairman of the Christian Democratic Employees’ Association (CDA).

concern for the local economy

Entrepreneurs and business associations in East Germany warned of the consequences for the domestic economy of possible AfD electoral successes. The state head of the Association of Family Entrepreneurs in Saxony, Christian Haase, told the “Tagesspiegel”: “The AfD would massively damage our business location.”

Dieter Bauhaus, President of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) Erfurt, said that Thuringian companies were concerned about the success of the AfD – “especially when it was linked to right-wing extremist, National Socialist and ethnic ideas”. In Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony, new state parliaments will be elected next year.