Bernd Frahne is a CDU member of the district council in Stendal and, since 2010, the mayor of Altmärkische Höhe, a municipality of around 1,700 people spread across a dozen or so small villages in Saxony-Anhalt. dpa describes him as the operator of a transport business. Over recent weeks he sent money to the Alternative for Germany, and he says publicly that he will vote for it.
The AfD has confirmed receiving two tranches of 5,000 euros. The figure of 10,000 in total comes from dpa and from Frahne himself, who acknowledged the two transfers when dpa asked him to confirm them. He declined to say more, adding that he would speak again after the state election on 6 September.
He also sent a letter to the state CDU. n-tv describes the document as an "open Brandbrief", and the Magdeburger Volksstimme quoted from it. In it Frahne writes that his conservative values — achievement, order, security, national sovereignty, economic rationality, the protection of cultural identity — are represented less and less within his own party. What he sees instead, he writes, is a party that moves step by step to the left, that raises its firewall against the AfD ever higher while accepting or even pushing cooperation with left and far-left forces. Where the CDU is supposed to be working with the "far left" he does not spell out, n-tv notes.
Parts of the CDU, he writes, have a justified fear that the country and the party are being betrayed and sold to the left. He says he wants the AfD to grow large enough to govern alone — not out of stubbornness, but so that the CDU finally wakes up. Tearing down the firewall and bringing down the party leader, Friedrich Merz, is what he is after. Speaking about the donation, he told n-tv that cooperation with the AfD group in the district council has been good and constructive. The magazine Focus reported that he is inviting his own expulsion, quoting him saying he wants them to throw him out and that the CDU is no longer his home or his future.
Mario Karschuunke, the state party's general secretary, told Focus the reports were being taken very seriously and would be a grave matter under party statutes if confirmed. The case goes to the district executive, which handles expulsion proceedings. Sven Schulze, the minister-president and the CDU's lead candidate, said on Politico's Berlin Playbook podcast that he did not view it well and that he found the approaches Frahne had taken wrong — definitely. He would deal with it after the election, he said, because a campaign was under way. Dirk Wiese of the SPD told the Rheinische Post that a CDU office-holder donating 10,000 euros to the AfD and demanding the firewall be abandoned was no insignificant local incident.
In Saxony-Anhalt the AfD is classified as confirmed far-right — Handelsblatt names the state office for the protection of the constitution as the body that made the classification. dpa puts the party above 40 per cent of the party vote in polling, against about 24 per cent for the CDU. n-tv cites an Infratest dimap survey from late July at 41 to 24; Handelsblatt cites a Pollytix survey in August at 43 to 23. The state is currently governed by a CDU, SPD and FDP coalition.
Why it is on the board
Second on n-tv's most-read ranking when we collected — one of the three German reading lists this board can see.
확인: n-tv · dpa · Handelsblatt