The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party will be denied the opportunity to gain a deputy speaker’s post in the German parliament, the Bundestag, despite being the second strongest party following the snap elections on February 23rd.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right CDU, which won the elections, said he will instruct his party not to elect an AfD MP to public office. The left-wing parties are in agreement.
This means that the AfD, which was formed in 2013, will again be denied the right to have an elected deputy speaker—as was the case following the 2017 and 2021 elections.
The behaviour of the establishment parties follows previous patterns: they are undemocratically defying Bundestag protocols and ignoring more than ten million German citizens who voted for the AfD.
The rules of the Bundestag clearly state that each parliamentary group “is represented by at least one deputy speaker,” but this is a rule that the ruling elites choose to ignore when dealing with the AfD which they consider to be their biggest political rival.
Indeed, the party doubled its share of the votes compared to the elections four years ago, receiving 21% of ballots.support. The AfD has been consistently campaigning on a tough anti-immigration platform, and has called out the previous governments for their mismanagement of the German economy.
AfD parliamentary group leader Bernd Baumann called Friedrich Merz’s proposal “extremely undemocratic,” saying the CDU leader was trying to curry favour with the leftists. The CDU is currently in talks to form a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), and Merz—as an appeasement—has already made a U-turn on his campaign promise to be tough on immigration.
Unsurprisingly, the SPD praised Merz for sidelining the AfD, with party politician Ralf Stegner calling it “a right and wise” move.
The CDU has also joined forces with the Left in the European Parliament (EP) where last year they denied the third strongest group, the conservative-sovereignist Patriots for Europe leading positions in the Parliament’s governing bodies, including an EP vice-presidency.
