Thuringia – a country between AfD, agony and absurdistan

The day Thuringia started to go crazy was the first day of 2009. I was having dinner with my family at my parents’ house in the Thuringian Forest when the phone rang. I was told that Dieter Althaus had had a serious accident. I had to come to the editorial office quickly.

Dieter Althaus: That was the name of the Prime Minister, whom I had been following as a journalist for a long time. A few hours earlier, he had collided head-on with a woman while skiing in Austria. He was wearing a helmet, she was not. He was in a coma, she had not survived.

Althaus’ personal tragedy developed into a major political drama. The frequency of headlines was relentless: Althaus transferred to a Thuringian hospital. Althaus in rehab on Lake Constance. Althaus convicted of negligent homicide. Althaus chosen in absentia as the leading candidate for the state election. Althaus returned to the State Chancellery. Althaus resigned from all offices after election disaster.

It was like a bad series that you couldn’t turn off. And it was broadcast nationwide. I had never seen so many camera crews and journalists in little Erfurt before.

As quickly as the sales of ski helmets rose, Thuringia’s reputation sank just as quickly. The state, governed solely by the CDU, whose image oscillated somewhere between Bach, Biedermeier and bratwurst, became the site of scandalous and spectacular events.

While a stunned Federal Republic learned of the murders of the NSU terrorists in Jena, the eternally ruling state CDU split into two bitterly warring camps and finally lost power to the first Left Party Prime Minister, Bodo Ramelow, in 2014. At the same time, the Hessian history teacher Björn Höcke and his AfD entered the Erfurt state parliament and ensured that a right-wing populist party became an extreme resistance movement.

A duel at the expense of others

Ramelow versus Höcke: This was the duel in the 2019 state election, in which the CDU, but also the governing parties SPD and Greens, were crushed. As a result, the Left and AfD were so strong together that it was impossible to govern without them. At the same time, the red-red-green coalition had lost its narrow majority.

The dwarfed CDU, paralyzed by internal struggles and caught up in decisions to separate itself, rejected any minimal consensus. When the Left, SPD and Greens defiantly called for Ramelow to be elected as prime minister, the Union allowed itself to be led into a tactical trap by the AfD and, in a secret ballot, elected a certain Thomas Kemmerich, who had previously led the FDP into the state parliament with 5.0005 percent. This was the first head of government since 1945 to have come to office thanks to right-wing extremists.

The rest is German history: Angela Merkel’s unconstitutional announcement in Pretoria to reverse the election. Christian Lindner’s ultimatum to Kemmerich. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer’s withdrawal from the CDU leadership. Ramelow’s re-election thanks to the Union.

After that: the de facto tolerance of a red-red-green minority government. The new state election that was first promised and then cancelled. The changing majorities, sometimes CDU with the left-wing coalition, sometimes CDU with AfD and FDP.

And by the way, the crises of this time: pandemics, wars, inflation.

Björn Höcke in Barbarossa pose

The fact that things turned out the way they did on last election Sunday came as no surprise to anyone. While in Saxony the AfD has neither a claim to the top of the state parliament nor a blocking minority and there is at least a chance of forming a majority government, in Thuringia a petrified Höcke in a Barbarossa pose leads the strongest faction. And with more than a third of the seats he has the power to lead the country into a constitutional crisis.

At the same time, there is no stable majority in sight. In order to govern, the CDU needs not only the radical populist general store BSW alongside the SPD. The Union also needs to talk to Ramelow again, within whom the state-supporting Thuringia savior and the tactical power politician are wrestling with each other.

Because: It is not enough to form a majority against the Left and the AfD. Instead, there is now a stalemate that makes a deal with the imploded Left necessary. In the meantime, the AfD can only watch as the other parties outmaneuver each other. And in Berlin? Once again, they know best what should or should not happen in Thuringia. Or both.

Everything feels like it did during the crazy Kemmerich crisis in February 2020. At that time, the left-wing state leader Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, who later moved to Berlin to learn to fear as the leader of the Left Party, greeted us journalists hanging around the state parliament with the greeting: “Good morning in Thuringia! Another new day in Absurdistan!”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t a joke. And it still isn’t to this day.

But I like living in this country, despite everything. If you don’t want to believe me, you can come to Erfurt, where I live, or to Jena, where I was born, or to the forest where I grew up and where new life is stirring between the dying spruce trees.

Incidentally, I belong to the large majority of voters in Thuringia who did not vote for the AfD, but who had a quiet, almost desperate hope that a democratically minded majority government could emerge that would be willing to shape things and restore some of the eroded trust in the ability of politicians to act. But what I am feeling right now is a great deal of exhaustion.

Because now in Absurdistan there seems to be only one alternative: Agony and the AfD. If the parties cannot come to some sort of agreement, a right-wing extremist president of the state parliament is possible and a Prime Minister Höcke cannot be ruled out.

And yet, nothing is predetermined, not on a ski slope, not in politics and yes, not even in this crazy Thuringia. It is not just the circumstances that determine our lives. It is our decisions.