Saxony-Anhalt elects AfD parliamentary speaker

The outgoing premier of Saxony-Anhalt says he can’t explain where an additional four votes backing the AfD’s Tobias Rausch as the state’s new parliamentary speaker came from.  

In a first for the far-right party, 35-year-old Rausch was elected to the post on Tuesday with the help of the populist BSW party (see entry below).

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group leadership had recommended that its 15 lawmakers in the state parliament abstain from voting.

But CDU regional leader and current state Premier Sven Schulze said it had become clear by this morning that not all the party’s lawmakers planned to do so. 

Some indicated that they planned to vote “no,” Schulze said in comments to the German press agency DPA. “But none of us said we would vote ‘yes,'” he added. “Not a single one.” 

Rausch was elected with 48 votes in favor and 29 against from 82 eligible votes in the secret ballot. There were five abstentions.

The AfD holds 39 seats in the parliament and the BSW five, meaning Rausch also got backing from members of other parties besides the AfD and BSW.

The center-left Social Democrats demanded answers, with the party’s general secretary, Tim Klüssendorf, calling for the CDU to “immediately clarify who from within its ranks may have considered this disastrous decision to be right.”

Klüssendorf also criticized the BSW for supporting Rausch’s election.

“The BSW has made a conscious decision to elect, for the first time since 1945, a politician from a far-right party to the leadership of a German parliament,” Klüssendorf told the Rheinische Post newspaper.

In addition to the CDU, the Social Democrats and the BSW, the Left party and the Greens are also represented in the state’s parliament. Except for the BSW, the other parties have refused to work with the AfD, but some combination of them cast a secret vote for Rausch.