The AfD’s secret plan was leaked. Why is the CDU/CSU implementing it?
Volksverpetzer
An internal AfD strategy paper outlines the path to power: polarization, an unbridgeable divide with the SPD, and rapprochement with the CDU/CSU. Why is the CDU increasingly adopting precisely these patterns—and what does this mean for the firewall and democracy?
The CDU is currently not only doing nothing against the far-right AfD, it is even actively helping it implement its plans through its ideological policies. In their leaked strategy paper, the AfD assigned them a passive role, but the CDU is proactively moving closer to the far right. In doing so, it is ticking off one point of the secret plan after another. The CDU leadership urgently needs to get its dangerous course under control if it does not want to make itself a direct accomplice to a new far-right government in Germany.
The CDU is making policy – for Chancellor Weidel?!
The CDU is currently helpless in dealing with the AfD. This is no longer a controversial observation either; experts and the public largely agree. Only the CDU leadership seems unable to grasp it. Everything it tries to counter the far right fits into what has happened since Merz said: "We must halve the AfD." He has now nearly doubled the AfD and halved the CDU in the process. We have already made a one-hour video about the Union’s destructive course and its responsibility for the AfD’s record election results.
But we have noticed something else: The CDU has not only taken an entirely counterproductive sharp turn to the right, thereby creating more problems than it solves. No, the Union is actually implementing the AfD’s secret strategy almost exactly as written, a strategy intended to make far-right politician Alice Weidel chancellor!
And no, we do not mean that metaphorically, exaggeratively or polemically. Yes, it sounds unbelievable, but the AfD actually no longer has to do much to implement its own strategy, because it now has the Union. The thing has become self-propelled. But let’s start from the beginning. What strategy are we actually talking about?
The AfD’s secret plan
In the summer of 2025, an internal AfD strategy paper became public, written by Bundestag member Beatrix von Storch. In it, she describes the party’s course for attaining power and making Alice Weidel chancellor.
The first step is to wage a “culture war.” Through a "polarization between the AfD and the Left," the AfD wants to “force the SPD and Greens to the left.” The “bourgeois-conservative camp” is to be separated from the “left camp,” and public debate is to focus on the AfD and the Left, on "Weidel or Reichinnek." According to the AfD’s logic, this is intended to make the SPD and Greens "lose their profile" and move to the left, away from the CDU.
At the same time, it wants to retain its core voters. The paper includes “East Germans,” “workers,” “Russian Germans,” “young voters” and “people in rural areas.” New groups are also to be won over: women, people over 60, academics, Christian churchgoers, as well as people with a migration background and from major cities. It wants to change the social climate so that fewer than 50 percent of citizens “are afraid of the AfD, support proceedings to ban it or reject cooperation with it.”
The AfD wants to make Germany ungovernable
In the second step, the differences between the Union and the SPD are to be made “unbridgeable.” The SPD’s “shift to the left” is supposed to make agreement on important issues within the coalition impossible. The AfD dreams of an "traffic-light coalition 2", and in a presentation about the strategy even illustrates the planned rupture between the coalition partners with a somewhat silly lightning bolt between Klingbeil and Merz. Not silly at all, but extremely dangerous: The AfD wants to deliberately make Germany ungovernable.
In the final third step, the Union’s “core brand of the social market economy” is to be challenged. The AfD wants to “appeal to the Union’s voter groups” and “increase the fear of losing votes to the AfD.” It wants to make itself compatible with the CDU by introducing motions that fit well with the CDU’s program and voters. The focus is to be on a turnaround in migration and economic policy.
The issues are supposed to be economic growth without climate protection, prosperity, migration and domestic security. Issues are to be raised that the CDU can support, but the SPD cannot. Alice Weidel smiles at this point. Because the goal of all this is clear: In the end, the AfD wants to take power. With the CDU as junior partner, as long as it is not enough to govern alone.
Quite an extreme plan, then. It shows that the AfD has no interest in participating constructively in our democracy. It wants to divide, incite and destroy – its only goal is power. Even if the price is Germany’s stability and ability to act. The AfD fans Putin and Trump will be pleased.
The Union is helping implement this strategy
But what does the Union have to do with this? In this plan, it is central, albeit as a fairly passive pawn from whom some are supposed to be driven away and to whom others want to ingratiate themselves.
But this 2025 plan has long since ceased to be merely a plan. We are in the middle of it. And the CDU is suddenly right at the forefront of its implementation. The Union is simply implementing the AfD’s master plan for power directly. No, really. Let’s take a look:
Let’s start again from the beginning, with point one. Certainly, the aggressive culture war originated and continues to originate with the AfD; it is its core identity. Von Storch also speaks publicly and literally of waging a “culture war.” Its programs clearly state that it wants to decide for itself what constitutes “proper” culture and is therefore worthy of funding – following Viktor Orbán’s example.
The Union in the culture war against the left
But this is not only about culture in the sense of art and high culture. The culture war also refers to the broader definition of culture as a way of life. The AfD deliberately attacks issues such as the rights of queer people, migration, feminism, climate protection, veganism and so on, which it attributes to a left-green bubble. By heavily polarizing these issues and portraying people with progressive views on them as enemies, it tries to divide society along these lines.
But who is eagerly joining this culture war against the left and thereby normalizing it? Exactly: the Union.
There are numerous examples of this from recent years. At one point, the Union moved so far to the right that its migration policy repeatedly violated applicable law at the German borders, without finding anything wrong with it. We have documented the entire rightward shift in migration, social and climate policy under Merz here.
“Circus tent” and “The left is over”
But it is also the statements discrediting the Left, Greens and everyone they stand up for that contribute to the culture war. The embarrassing and derogatory debate over the Pride flag on the Bundestag, including the chancellor’s “circus tent” comparison. Merz’s ranting against "green and left-wing idiots" ("The left is over"). Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer, who called for a culture war against the AfD, is instead repeatedly accused of waging a conservative culture war. In the Merzian style, he railed in an article for the Süddeutsche Zeitung against an alleged “eco-socialist culture of outrage.”
Weimer excluded three left-wing bookstores from the German Book Prize without presenting the information on which he based his decision. He is accused of calling artistic freedom into question because he says that the state should fund only what it considers right in the cultural sphere. Institutions and individuals in the cultural sector repeatedly voice concern that they will no longer receive funding for addressing critical issues.
Weimer banned gender-inclusive language in his ministry and “recommended” that other publicly funded institutions do the same.
Right-wing culture war? The Union is taking part!
The CDU is now also reliably jumping on the biggest culture-war debates. It was practically caught up in the campaign against the then candidate for the position of constitutional court judge, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, and allowed itself to be swept along. In the end, a candidate whom they themselves had previously deemed qualified was not elected.
Some CDU members were also led to make questionable comments about the murdered Charlie Kirk. It should actually be possible to condemn a public shooting without downplaying the far-right extremist and his racist, dehumanizing and conspiracy-driven statements.
Instead, the statements by Carsten Linnemann and the Young Union emphasized Kirk’s advocacy of freedom of expression. Advocacy for freedom of expression. By a far-right extremist who deliberately provoked with Holocaust relativization, the denigration of Black people and opposition to secularism. He did not promote fair debate, but disguised racist and far-right discourses as such. The Union needs to explain that to us again. And especially Bundestag member Caroline Bosbach, who in a post later deleted even called him a "fighter for Western values."
The CDU’s “internal AfD”
There are still CDU members who have not lost their heart and common sense in the right-wing culture war, such as former CDU Secretary General Ruprecht Polenz, who also condemned the attack but said: “Nevertheless, it does not ennoble the murdered man’s views,” pointing out that Kirk was being turned into a martyr by far-right extremists.
But the CDU is increasingly struggling to contain a tendency that journalist Bernd Ulrich describes in a commentary for Die Zeit as its “internal AfD.” It is a highly worthwhile article in which Ulrich analyzes how, over the past decades, Adenauer, Kohl and Merkel devoted considerable energy to ensuring “that the reactionary, nationalist, resentment-filled side of the CDU (and of all of us?) never came to the fore.” Merz can no longer do that – and is himself part of the problem that Merkel wanted to prevent.
And this is devastating. Because the strengthening of this side of the CDU means that, consciously or unconsciously, it is carrying out the AfD’s strategy itself. Because the culture war is not where it ends.
The rift with the SPD
The CDU not only supports the culture war against everything to its left, it is also diligently working on the “unbridgeable” rift with the SPD. This is one part of the AfD strategy that has developed differently from what the party planned. The culture war is not actually pushing anyone to the left. The SPD and Greens have also moved to the right in recent years (just think of Chancellor Scholz, who wanted to “deport on a large scale”). Even the Left shows an increase in right-wing demands after 2017 in an analysis of election programs.
But because the CDU is also moving so far to the right, not only in election programs but also in its concrete policies and rhetoric, the rift desired by the AfD is nevertheless opening up within the black-red coalition. The CDU is slowly crossing lines that even the SPD does not want to follow. This can be seen, for example, in the SPD parliamentary group’s protest against the election of AfD state parliament president Tobias Rausch in Saxony-Anhalt. The SPD is protesting – while the CDU first desperately tries to pin the additional votes for Rausch, which presumably came from its own ranks, on others, and then apparently has to send its parliamentary group outside so that none of them also elects a neo-Nazi as minister president. Because the CDU can no longer even guarantee that.
The AfD is therefore still following the path laid out in its strategy paper – only to the right instead of the left. But this works only because the CDU allows itself to be pushed so far to the right by it that it creates the rift in the coalition itself, even though the SPD has followed it to the right.
Aligning with the AfD
Which brings us to the third step of the AfD plan: becoming compatible with the Union. The AfD wants to “appeal to the Union’s voter groups” and spread fear within the party of losing votes. It needs a mood in the country in which as few people as possible strongly reject the AfD and coalitions with it, or want to ban it. It wants to pressure the CDU with motions close to CDU interests but impossible with the SPD.
The fear of losing votes has definitely worked. The lower the bars representing the CDU’s polling and election results sink, the closer it moves toward the AfD. Even though this very proximity is the reason for its declining support, something nobody at the top of the Union wants to acknowledge. And once again, the Union is even relieving the AfD of work on its plan.
The list of groups the AfD wants to reach almost exactly matches the population groups Chancellor Merz repeatedly alienates and insults: women, pensioners, people with a migration background, workers, young people – there can be no talk of a strategy to bind these people to the CDU. Instead, he and the CDU use them to legitimize racist statements (women), question their financial basis and want them to work more (pensioners), want to remove them from the cityscape (people with a migration background), accuse them of laziness and idleness (workers) and alienate young people on many different levels.
The CDU is tearing down its own firewall
Since voters are also punishing this behavior, the CDU is clinging to its last avenue to power: tearing down the firewall against the AfD. Oh, oops, that is precisely the most important goal of the AfD strategy. That is exactly how it was planned. Whether it is the alleged four CDU representatives who voted for the AfD state parliament president in Saxony-Anhalt, or a joint motion by the AfD and CDU against Stolpersteine in Heidenau, Saxony – the CDU is currently tearing stones out of the firewall itself, sometimes entirely without necessity. And it is openly discussing whether excluding the far right from power has not gone on long enough. Perhaps enough time has passed since 1945?
Right now, we can watch the CDU find another building block for a blue-black coalition: demonizing the Left during coalition negotiations in Berlin. Yes, there are serious allegations of antisemitism against the Left. But in no world do they justify what has been happening in conservative and right-wing circles for weeks: Markus Söder (CSU) is calling for a “firewall to the left”; far-right WELT author Ulf Poschardt sees the Left as “the greatest danger to the political culture of the Federal Republic since 1949”; CDU member of parliament Christoph Ploß speaks of an “absolute dam breaking.” The Young Union wants to socially ostracize the SPD and Greens for coalition talks with the Left. A level of vehemence that is sometimes hard to find even regarding the (officially confirmed) far-right AfD. The Left, incidentally, is not even monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution – unlike the AfD.
Is the Union really concerned about antisemitism?
At least ostensibly, there are two reasons why the Union is losing its head: first, the Left’s plans to socialize large private housing holdings, which the SPD and Greens would presumably support. This causes such panic among Merz & Co. that they would prefer simply to ban socialization measures quickly. The Union therefore paradoxically portrays the Left’s demands as unconstitutional – although they are NOT, even if they are legally controversial – and instead calls for socialization to be banned – which, ironically, is likely to be more unconstitutional than the Left’s demands.
The second reason is the allegations of antisemitism. Apart from the serious problems with antisemitism among the Left mentioned earlier, the Union’s theatrical outcry is downright hypocritical. Because antisemitism is obviously not a migrant or left-wing problem, but a societal one. And the entire alleged fight for the safety of Jewish life in Germany appears rather hollow when one considers how Friedrich Merz only in September described antisemitism as “the most perfidious form of xenophobia,” a statement that inherently places Jewish women and men as non-Germans – which itself can be criticized as quite antisemitic.
The CDU Berlin is the reason that, following its funding scandal two years ago, the funds for promoting antisemitism prevention have not been able to be distributed in full since 2024. And the inscription “Never again is now,” shown at the Young Union’s Germany Day in reference to the Left in Berlin instrumentalizes the Holocaust for its own political goals. The phrase was coined by Holocaust survivors. Alongside millions of Jewish women and men, leftists, social democrats and communists also sat in the concentration camps. Equating the Nazi regime with a red-red-green government mocks all its victims. The Union could address all of this if it were truly concerned with antisemitism and protecting Jewish life. It is a misguided path taken by the Christian Democrats that is particularly painful at this time.
A “firewall to the left” in order to tear down one to the right
This already gives rise to the suspicion that the CDU is more concerned with power and preventing left-wing policies after all (since it would be the other possible coalition partner for the SPD and Greens). And this demonization of the Left has another function: It contributes to equating the far-right AfD with the Left, which is in no way considered extremist. The CDU has incompatibility resolutions against both, which is increasingly causing problems in forming governments. While in Thuringia it still prefers to reach agreements with the Left rather than the AfD, things already seem different in neighboring Saxony-Anhalt.
The CDU is increasingly tearing itself apart over the firewall issue, and a discourse framing the Left as too “extremist” to form a coalition also helps normalize cooperation with the AfD. Bremen’s CDU state leader has already stated it publicly: If the SPD and Greens can form a coalition with the Left on the basis of a commitment against antisemitism and to Israel’s right to exist, why should the CDU not be able to do the same with the AfD?
Inventing a “firewall to the left,” which is then supposedly “torn down” (there have been and still are numerous coalitions in which the Left participated without incident; in Thuringia it even governed for two legislative terms), helps legitimize crossing such boundaries oneself. Except that the AfD and the Left simply cannot be equated! Not according to the findings of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, not according to what can be found in party programs, and it is an insane shift in discourse that this even has to be discussed! And through all of this, the AfD’s fascists are rubbing their hands with glee.
The CDU must get its far-right side under control
But this brings us back to the AfD strategy that the CDU is implementing so flawlessly. It has helped drive the shift to the right, which presumably also brought voters from the SPD and Greens to the Left. The party’s own foundation confirms that Merz’s cooperation with the AfD not only weakened the CDU, but also strengthened the Left.
This makes it partly responsible for the increasingly difficult government formations, for which many, sometimes very different, parties have to come together. And by now it is itself deeply involved in making the AfD acceptable as a partner. Through actual and alleged cooperation on motions and elections, discussions about whether the firewall is still needed at all, the creation of a false equivalence between the AfD and the Left, and considerable obstruction regarding the motion to ban the AfD.
The CDU is destroying itself – for the AfD
The CDU is currently fighting on the front line for the AfD’s goal that fewer than 50 percent of citizens should want to ban the AfD, perceive it as a threat or reject cooperation with it. Incidentally, 57% of Germans support an examination of the AfD by the Federal Constitutional Court and 68% see it as a threat to democracy.
How did it come to this? It is probably, as Bernd Ulrich writes, the strengthening of the reactionary, nationalist side of the CDU, which leaders such as Angela Merkel kept under control and which seems to be slipping out of that control under Merz’s disastrous course. A side that also stands in continuity with an incomplete denazification after the Second World War.
It is damn important that the CDU gets this side under control again if it does not want to make itself an accomplice to a new far-right government in Germany. And if the goal is not already to have conservatives serve as stepping stones for fascists for a second time, it would be in the Union’s own vital interest to end this misguided path. Because in the end, it is destroying itself in the process as well.