The crisis in Thuringia's governing coalition moved a step on Friday: ten more BSW members of the state parliament want to leave the party, and according to dpa all three of the party's ministers are among them — the deputy state premier and finance minister Katja Wolf, the digital minister Steffen Schütz and the environment minister Tilo Kummer. The party's state co-chair alongside Wolf, Gernot Süßmuth, resigned his post.
This is the second departure this week. On Wednesday three members had already left both party and parliamentary group; they intend to form a parliamentary group under a party of their own founding, "Your Voice Counts". That had left the BSW group with twelve members.
What was first reported and what was said at the press conference are not the same, and the order matters. The initial dpa information was that the ten wanted to leave both the group and the party. Later, at the press conference, the group leader Sigrid Hupach said the BSW group would continue for now with twelve members. "We continue to stand by the coalition," she said; the next steps would be discussed in the coming days. Thuringia's premier, Mario Voigt of the CDU, also said afterwards that the coalition would hold and that he intended to keep governing. He called it a day of clarity.
Wolf gave the reason as the federal party. It had moved away from the founding consensus, she said, and the last few days had made clear there could no longer be a common path. They wanted to keep the focus on Thuringia. "We were not elected for permanent defensive battles," she said — nor, she added, for flirting with the far right.
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