The federal government assumes that it will be able to push down the currently relatively high AfD poll numbers again. After the Corona pandemic with the Russian war of aggression, we are in the second serious crisis in a row, a government spokesman said in Berlin on Monday. At the same time, there is the challenge of making the country fit for the future. "These are all big and complex issues and questions." The best thing you can do is to work through all this and come up with good solutions. "And we'll succeed in doing that, and then it will be less with these poll numbers for populists."
The spokesman reiterated similar statements by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) at the weekend. "The Chancellor is optimistic that if we do a good job and solve the problems of this country well, as is intended, that we will no longer have to worry much about this issue."
When asked what topics were to be worked through specifically with regard to the AfD poll results, he said that it was about "the entire project of this federal government". The aim is to shape the transformation, to make the country a CO2045-neutral industrial country by 2 or to advance education and digitalisation. The issue of migration is also one of them. That's why they are working "intensively" to achieve better control. The right-wing populist AfD was recently at 18 to 19 percent in some polls, on a par with the SPD. One of its core demands is to limit the influx of migrants.
Greens parliamentary group leader Britta Hasselmann expressed self-criticism in view of these poll results. "I see responsibility in all democratic parties from the Union to the SPD, FDP and Greens," said Hasselmann on Monday in the ARD "morning magazine". It is "completely wrong to say: There is a reason and it is a party". The parties must ask themselves what causes uncertainty among people and why they are dissatisfied with the democratic parties.
Deputy SPD chairman Ralf Stegner voiced criticism of the lengthy decisions of the traffic light coalition. "Every unsolved problem that scares people, such as everything to do with the heating law, drives voters into the hands of those who make politics with fear, offer no solutions themselves, but have scapegoats for everything," Stegner told the Tagesspiegel. At the same time, Stegner accused CDU chairman Friedrich Merz of trivializing the AfD: "Votes for the AfD are not reminders, but attacks on democracy. Mr. Merz is completely wrong with his trivializing lesson talk."
Meanwhile, AfD leader Alice Weidel has rejected Chancellor Scholz's description of her party as a "bad mood party". "The citizens have actually lost their laughter thoroughly," Weidel told the German Press Agency in Berlin. "But this is not due to a supposedly ill-tempered AfD, but to an amateur troupe that delivers a sad political cabaret in the federal cabinet every day."