Merz Says He Will Never Work With Germany’s Right-Wing Party, AfD, Despite Falling Public Support

Despite low approval ratings and questions about the survival of his coalition government, Chancellor Friedrich Merz says he won’t approach the far-right Alternative for Germany to join his coalition.Mr. Merz is citing Germany’s nationalist past under Nazi leadership for refusing to cooperate with the right-wing rival to his Social Democrats. During an appearance Tuesday at the East German Economic Forum at Bad Saarow outside Berlin, Mr. Merz said of the AfD, “This party wants to return to the era before Adenauer,” referencing Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany post-World War II who, like Mr. Merz, led the Christian Democratic Union. “With Adenauer, we in Germany left the era of nationalism behind us — and I’m not going to lead the Federal Republic of Germany, nor my own party, back to that time,” Mr. Merz added to applause from the audience.Mr. Merz said the AfD is a threat to Germany’s postwar democracy and he’s not looking for a new coalition partner anyway. “I am not looking for another partner and I do not have another partner,” he said.A European Parliament member from Spain’s far-right Vox party, Hermann Tertsch, responded by calling Mr. Merz a “ridiculous liar.” “Nobody wants to take Germany back to the times before Adenauer. The problem is that you do not have the courage to give Germany a chance to stop and escape socialist decay,” Mr. Tertsch said in an X post. “The AfD wants to recover the values of the age of Adenauer which Your party has been ignoring, betraying and destroying for decades now. Adenauer would have left the CDU under Merkel, outraged by so much treason.”Mr. Merz’s comments came on the anniversary of the killing of Christian Democrat politician Walter Lübcke, who was assassinated in 2019 by a right-wing extremist. Mr. Merz visited his grave on Monday. “This murder must continue to serve as a warning for us,” Mr. Merz said in an X post.Mr. Merz has warned about the rise of AfD in the past. While running for office last year, he called it his “most important opponent.” “This party stands against everything our party and our country built up in Germany over the past years and decades. It stands against our Western orientation, it stands against the euro, it stands against NATO,” Mr. Merz said at the time.Support for AfD has grown as Germany’s economy has faced years of struggle. The party has strong support in the former East Germany and a recent poll shows AfD has support from nearly 40 percent of voters in the state of Saxony-Anhalt ahead of September’s state elections. A win there would give a nationalist conservative party control of a regional government for the first time since World War II.After his speech, Mr. Merz welcomed the new Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, to Berlin. He said it was the beginning of a “fresh start” in relations with Budapest after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán, who had close ties to the Kremlin and blocked European Union aid for Ukraine. Mr. Magyar told reporters at a joint press conference that he had plans to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky in the coming days.

Merz Says He Will Never Work With Germany’s Right-Wing Party, AfD, Despite Falling Public Support

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