Rob Denning Germany's governing CDU is in open panic. A new poll putting the far-right AfD's support in Brandenburg at twice that of Minister President Dietmar Woidke's SPD, which currently runs the state government, has blown up the party's long-standing refusal to deal with the far right, according to Insa polling cited by Welt.
The numbers explain the mood at the CDU's crisis summit with Merz, where state party chiefs pushed for a shift in strategy, according to Welt's report on the meeting. The party is now confronting what Welt calls a fundamental decision on how to handle the AfD, with broad internal agreement that something has to change, as Welt reports.
That something is the Brandmauer, the unwritten rule under which every mainstream German party has refused coalitions or formal cooperation with the AfD since its rise a decade ago. Welt's reporting describes the mood inside the Union as panic, and the old formula as effectively finished.
Hypothesis: Brandenburg is a preview of a dilemma every center-right party in Europe now faces, not a uniquely German crisis. Supporting this: the CDU's collapse to single digits on its own mirrors a pattern already visible in France, Austria and the Netherlands, where mainstream conservatives have lost voters to harder-right rivals and faced the same choice between cordon sanitaire and cooperation. Against this: Germany's Brandmauer is unusually formal and historically loaded, tied directly to the postwar consensus against far-right parties, so the CDU may hold the line longer than its peers even as the political cost rises.
What to watch: whether Merz's crisis summit produces a change in CDU policy toward the AfD, or just a public argument that leaves the Brandmauer formally intact but hollowed out before Brandenburg's and other eastern states' next elections.
