Hesse’s Prime Minister Boris Rhein (CDU) has clearly differentiated himself from the AfD after statements by CDU leader Friedrich Merz on how to deal with the AfD at the municipal level. “For the CDU Hessen I can say very clearly that the firewall is very clear. They are not our partners, we do not work with them,” he said on Monday in the ZDF morning magazine. The AfD is a party “that doesn’t fit with Christian Democratic values”.
Cooperation with the AfD is also not possible for him at the municipal level, and he also did not understand Friedrich Merz that way. When asked how Friedrich Merz meant his statements, Rhein replied: “You have to ask Friedrich Merz yourself.” He understood him that one had to speak to elected AfD mayors, for example.
In the ZDF summer interview on Sunday, Merz reaffirmed that the Union would not cooperate with the AfD. However, he now restricted this to “legislative bodies”, for example at the European, federal or state level. If a district administrator in Thuringia and a mayor in Saxony-Anhalt were elected by the AfD, then those were democratic elections, said Merz. “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.” What exactly he means by that, however, remained open in the interview.
Rhein describes his party colleague Thorsten Frei’s proposal to abolish the individual right to asylum and replace it with quotas for taking in refugees in Europe as an “interesting idea.” It will be deepened further.
ZDF morning magazine
