SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert warned against working with the party in the future on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the AfD. The “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” (NOZ) said Kühnert: “It is crucial for the basic democratic consensus of our society that the AfD, as a pariah among the parties, will not be able to achieve any direct political effect in the future – not only in federal politics, but everywhere.”
It is the responsibility of all Democrats “and especially those in the liberal-conservative spectrum not only to maintain the firewall to the blue-brown border, but to stabilize it”.
“The firewall crumbles whenever conservatives complain about the lack of coalition and alliance options and forget that the taboo on cooperation with the far right is a democratic imperative that outweighs one’s own prospects of power,” the SPD general secretary continued.
Right from the start, resentment and misanthropy were “like the air the AfD breathes”. “Hate and exclusion are not characteristics of a radicalization of the party or demands of a party wing, but they are the essence of the AfD, applied to every policy area. As long as the AfD exists, nothing will change,” says the former chairman of the SPD youth organization (Jusos).
The party researcher from the University of Mainz, Jürgen Falter, meanwhile no longer considers a government participation of the AfD to be out of the question. “It will still take a while before the AfD governs in a federal state, but it cannot be ruled out – see the experience with the left -” said Falter in the NOZ. The fact that the party is so successful indicates “that it fills a gap in the spectrum of parties felt by the voters and not filled by the other parties”.
