Don’t play ball with ultras deal with ultras

“To the right of our party, there can be no democratic or legal parties”. This is a phrase attributed to Franz Josef Strauss (1915-1988), the patriarch of the Christian Socialist Union of Bavaria (CSU), regarding their strategy that for decades, seemed to work in this prosperous and traditional German land. The Bavarian conservatives politically stood so far to the right that any group or party which attempted to stand further to the right, was seen as an irrelevance, or condemned to prohibition. It’s a tough strategy that can be even tougher to square with the more centrist positions of its fraternal party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The relations between Strauss and another great patriarch, that of the CDU, Helmut Kohl (1939-2017), were as complex as those presently between Angela Merkel and Horst Seehofer. The behaviour of the current Bavarian leader towards the Chancellor often seems more rival-like than that of an ally. The CSU, under Seehofer, has defended positions, with regards to migration in the midst of the arrival of refugees in Germany, which have seemed dangerously similar to those of extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD). However, they have always avoided being tempted into teaming up with AfD, in exchange for maintaining power. When the CSU lost its traditional absolute majority in the elections last October, nobody doubted that they would continue to rule out a pact with AfD. Not only because there were other options – but because until a German party disproves the unwritten rule, no self-respecting political party makes deals with parties with neo-Nazi ties or connotations.