IT IS AS unusual in Germany as anywhere to see conservatives cavort with Marxists. But at a demonstration in Bitterfeld, a town in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, flags bearing the names of almost all Germany’s political parties flutter in the breeze, from the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) to the Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) all the way to the hard-left Die Linke. For many in Bitterfeld’s town square, the prospect of the AfD in power is a horrifying reminder of German history’s darkest period.
The Bunt statt braun (colourful instead of brown) demos began last year to counter rallies organised by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Others hope that the centre can somehow win back its lost voters: perhaps by ditching the wildly unpopular Mr Merz. Germany’s proportional-voting system means absolute majorities are unusual. Parties assemble in a variety of coalitions, often given colourful names. But the AfD has been blocked from power everywhere by a Brandmauer, or firewall, that other parties have erected around it. The most important firewall is that maintained by the CDU, Germany’s ruling party and traditionally its largest. Has the policy worked? For some, keeping the AfD out of power is justification enough. The AfD is among the more extreme of Europe’s populist outfits, many of which shun its company. It flirts with racism and Nazi imagery, has sympathy for Vladimir Putin and harbours former neo-Nazis in its ranks. Its boorish behaviour demeans parliaments. It is dawning on the CDU that it has painted itself into a corner. Voters are shifting, too. Yet the CDU has no easy way out. Tearing down the Brandmauer would split the party down the middle and trigger a voter exodus. Even minor violations have caused trouble. This sparked protests across Germany and boosted support for Die Linke at the subsequent election. As for the AfD, it once railed against the Brandmauer as a gross violation of democracy. But these days many in the AfD look forward to governing alone. That seems right. the AfD is riven by scandal, power struggles and discord, especially on foreign policy Although it has professionalised its organisation and communication. It has no coherent governing programme. Off the record, party figures are extraordinarily rude about one another. But none of this seems to matter. “It protects them from the disappointment that accountability in a democracy implies. In despair, some mainstream politicians, including Ms Winter in the CDU, now look favourably on calls to ban the AfD, something explicitly allowed under Germany’s constitution. But even if parliament approved that proposal, which seems unlikely, the constitutional court would take years to rule on it. The Brandmauer looks intact for now. But a growing number sympathise with Mr Stecker’s gloomier view.
Of the country’s 16 states, only tiny Saarland has a single-party government. The Brandmauer in effect obliges the party to seek coalitions only to its left, especially with the SPD, which has been in power in Germany almost without interruption since 1998—despite these days barely polling in double figures. Support for the anti-AfD Brandmauer has dwindled from a clear majority to 41%. In 2020 the CDU voted with the AfD to elect a (short-lived) premier in Thuringia; the ensuing furore toppled Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s national leader. In January 2025 Mr Merz ordered his party to vote with the AfD on symbolic anti-migration measures in the Bundestag. One former CDU minister says that 90% of senior figures in the party are opposed to working with the AfD.
It formalised the policy in 2018 with an “incompatibility resolution” banning co-operation with both the AfD and Die Linke. “We don’t exclude the AfD because of the 2018 resolution, but because we don’t share any values with it,” says Wiebke Winter, head of the CDU in the city-state of Bremen. “Anyone still talking about firewalls has not recognised the signs of the times,” said Michael Kretschmer, the CDU premier of Saxony, recently. CDU members’ frustration with concessions to the SPD inspires occasional calls for a minority government that could, on certain issues (such as migration, tax and energy), seek a “conservative majority” with the AfD. The chancellor is said to be traumatised by the experience. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” says Malte Kaufmann, an AfD MP. The party’s deputy chairman in Saxony-Anhalt has said their voters want them to “finish off” the CDU rather than co-operate with it. Behind the Brandmauer you can promise anything, says Christian Stecker, a political scientist at the Technical University in Darmstadt. “It would not only damage us politically but would be against the principles that define our republic,” he says. “It’s too late for the CDU to turn around, and too late for the AfD to accept any turnaround,” he says. “Some things will tumble down, new things will emerge—and we don’t know what it will all look like.”
