She calls for an AfD ban and calls Friedrich Merz “extremely dangerous”. This only makes the AfD stronger, comments Georg Anastasiadis.
Saskia Esken studied her party's unpleasant survey results over the turn of the year – and once again drew the wrong conclusions: In response to the impending fall of her party from the Saxon state parliament, the SPD leader is calling for this Ban on the AfD.
This is just as unimaginative as their bloodshed against the CDU opposition leader Friedrich Merz at Christmas. She called it “extremely dangerous” for Germany’s democracy, hardly less dangerous than the AfD, which she now describes almost word for word as a “great danger”.
Esken wants to regularly review the AfD ban – attacks on Merz poison the political culture
She's not even wrong about the latter. But simply excluding everyone who is fighting for voters more successfully than the SPD from the spectrum of competitors on the political market, be it through party law or the moral club, is unlikely to prove a promising path for the reeling Chancellor's party. With her excessive attacks on Merz, Esken is poisoning the political culture and doing exactly what she accuses the CDU and AfD of: she is dividing and destroying the democratic coexistence of the moderate forces.
This is not stopping the rise of the AfD's agitators, which Germany actually has to fear more than ever in the year of the September state elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. Because their ideas wouldn't go away even if, which is difficult enough, they managed to enforce their ban.
SPD must first bring back its own voters
The SPD could only trim the AfD if it managed to bring back disgruntled voters. A look at Denmark, where the Social Democrats are still the classic party of average earners and have occupied the political center for many years with a combination of strict immigration policy and committed social policy, would be helpful.
But anyone who turns the SPD into a repository for “woke” fringe groups, like the shockingly weak current party leadership, is leading it further and further into the sidelines. A ban on the AfD doesn't help either.
George Anastasiadis
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