German centre faces new pressure from political fringes

Germany’s silly season is over before it began – as the country’s traditionally stable landscape feels the squeeze on its hard right- and left-wing fringes.

After more than a decade of winning elections in the political centre, Angela Merkel’s Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are chasing right-wing voters that have defected to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) ahead of a crucial state election in October.

Meanwhile, a radical Left Party leader will soft-launch on Saturday a new political movement called Aufstehen (Arise), that political rivals fear will fragment further Germany’s left.

Hoping to take back Bavaria’s political right wing, CSU leader Horst Seehofer opened the state’s election campaign on Thursday evening with a take-no-prisoners beer hall address that ran the gamut from attacks on “rapist” migrants to a tirade against “fake news” media distortions.

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As federal interior minister in Berlin, Seehofer is under pressure from Bavarian voters – and his own party colleagues – to deliver a policy before the October election that matches his tough talk on migration.

A month bringing Germany’s government to the brink on the migration question, Seehofer is negotiating with Austria and Italy to take back migrants already registered there.

This week Bavaria launched new centralised holding facilities for asylum seekers and, according to media reports, is to turn a disused Munich airport hangar into a prison offering a faster turnaround on deportations.

Beer-drinking crowd

The CSU interior minister’s hardline migration push has proved popular with conservative voters but prompted a backlash from critics who accuse him of undermining German asylum procedures for political gain. He brushed off such claims on Thursday night, telling the beer-drinking crowd that “here he is before you, the evil Seehofer”.

“All the things I’ve been called: murderer, terrorist and racist,” he joked, to cheers from drinkers. He hit out at media claims that Bavaria’s new centralised migration facilities were “concentration camps”.

Learning from US president Donald Trump, whom Seehofer said shouldn’t be “criticised across the board”, the CSU leader promised to communicate in future directly with voters via Twitter.

Three years after Bavaria was on the frontlines of Germany’s migration crisis the CSU, its absolute majority in the Munich state parliament under threat, has broken with chancellor Merkel’s more liberal migration approach.

Another break looms on the far end of the political spectrum. The website of the left-wing movement Aufstehen (Arise) will go live on Saturday, encouraging people to sign up and contribute to a political manifesto to be launched on September 4th.

Social agenda

The driving force behind the movement is Dr Sahra Wagenknecht, Bundestag co-leader of the Left Party, and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, a former leader of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). They are drawing inspiration from other political forces that began life as movements, outside traditional political party structures, such as France’s hard left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

“Our goal is naturally [to achieve] different political majorities, and a new government with a social agenda,” said Wagenknecht.

Already a divisive figure in her party, she denies her aim is to splinter the Left Party vote but says rather it’s to force the SPD to break with its centrist, Schröder-era agenda and join a left-wing coalition to eject the CDU/CSU from power in Berlin.

Aufstehen/Arise will focus on policies to ease pressure on Germany’s low-wage workers, in particular where they are in conflict with newly arrived migrants, from the labour to housing markets. “If the pressure is great enough,” she said, “parties will, in their own interest, open their lists to our ideas and campaigners.”