Safeguarding Democracy or Paving the Way for Extremists to Power? Constitutional Policy and Party Interests in the German State of Thuringia

Germany is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading democracies (V-Dem Institute 2022). Nevertheless, the robustness of its democratic institutions has been challenged, most notably manifested in the electoral success of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). Since its founding in 2013, the party has consistently gained in voter support while becoming more ideologically radical. This has intensified political debates about creating a “firewall” between the AfD and all other parties at all tiers of government. German democracy may thus be at risk, depending on the strategic behavior of mainstream parties, which in many cases have played “a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2023). Our paper sets out to explore these relationships by investigating how German mainstream parties employ constitutional reform policies to prevent the AfD’s participation in government. In doing so, we argue that right-wing mainstream parties are particularly torn between main-taining the democratic polity and prioritizing their short-term ambitions and interests, as their policy positions and electorates are close to that of the AfD. Therefore, they might initiate constitutional reforms aiming to both securing democracy and to benefiting from the AfD’s support against the left-wing parties. However, as even minor changes of formal rules and procedures can abet major shifts (Mahoney and Thelen 2010), such “double-edged” reforms may ultimately affect the legitimacy of the democratic order and thus accelerate its erosion. We examine this argument by analyzing the constitutional policies of parliamentary parties in the state of Thuringia during the current legislative period (2020-2024), which is a critical case in several respects. First, the Thuringian AfD is particularly challenging, being the second strongest group in the state parliament and the most extremist among the party’s regional branches. Second, the Thuringian Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has pursued an ambiguous strategy in parliamentary opposition. While it temporarily supported the minority government of three left-wing parties following the “firewall” directive from the CDU federal party, it has also occasionally coordinated with the AfD to push through its preferred policies. Third, the “accidental” election of a liberal (FDP) Prime Minister at the beginning of the legislative period, which provoked a nationwide scandal (Grotz and Schroeder 2023: 476), suggested a need for adjusting the rules of government formation and composition. Against this backdrop, the CDU parliamentary group submitted a series of constitutional initiatives, including a reform of the procedure for electing the Thuringian PM (Kropp 2023) and new regulations on “professional and personal requirements for the office of minister”. We trace these two cases of constitutional policy to show the CDU’s equivocal strategy towards the AfD and, using counterfactual analysis, to uncover their potentially detrimental consequences for democratic legitimacy. This way, our paper not only contributes to the emerging field of autocratic threats in established democracies but also to the debates about safeguarding democracy through constitutional means (Graham et al. 2017; Bourne 2022) as well as democratic regression “from below” (Grumbach 2022; Mickey 2022).