For weeks, Germany’s Christian Democrats wondered whether the mysterious donor even existed. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund had told supporters at a campaign rally in Magdeburg that a CDU politician from Saxony-Anhalt had just given his party €5,000 and wished it well.
The CDU publicly questioned the story. It turns out Siegmund had understated it: the donor is Bernd Prange, a CDU district councilor in the town of Stendal and mayor of the small municipality of Altmärkische Höhe. Prange did not give the AfD €5,000, but €10,000 in two separate payments, and has now explained why in an extraordinary open letter to his own party.
According to the letter, first reported by German weekly Junge Freiheit, the 59-year-old says the decision was deliberate and born from “deep concern for our country”. After 35 years in the CDU, he no longer believes the party represents the conservative principles that brought him into it. Prange lists performance, order, security, national sovereignty, economic common sense and the protection of cultural identity among those principles. Instead, he writes, the CDU is moving “step by step to the left” while raising its firewall against the AfD ever higher. His answer is unusually direct: he wants the AfD to win.
You might be interested
Discovering the Far Center
Prange Breaks With the CDU
Prange says he hopes the AfD becomes strong enough in the state election on 6 September to govern Saxony-Anhalt alone. He intends to vote for the party himself and hopes other conservatives will follow. The purpose, he argues, is to force the CDU to change course. He wants the firewall against the AfD torn down and Chancellor Friedrich Merz removed as a symbol of a party leadership that, in his view, has abandoned the Union’s conservative core.
That goes considerably further than a disgruntled member complaining about Berlin. Prange is financing the CDU’s principal competitor weeks before an election while urging voters to give it an absolute majority.
His argument is rooted partly in his experience at local level. In the Stendal district council, he says cooperation between CDU and AfD representatives has worked for years without the drama surrounding the national firewall. He describes the relationship with the AfD group as “good and constructive” and says both sides have worked together to block left-wing initiatives.
Prange argues that this is simply how local politics functions when councilors are dealing with practical questions rather than ideological purity tests. CDU members, he says, already cooperate with other factions when they believe it serves the district. He singles out Saxony-Anhalt’s CDU leader and Minister-President Sven Schulze, accusing him of opening the door to forces on the left. As long as Schulze continues down that path, Prange says, his own vote will go to the AfD.
You might be interested
One Man, One Vote: Except in Germany
Merz’s Old Promise Comes Back
The CDU has responded with the threat of expulsion. State Secretary-General Mario Karschunke described the case as serious and said Prange’s local party organization would examine it. That body could initiate proceedings to remove him from the CDU.
Prange himself has no intention of making matters easy by simply leaving. Asked by the Volksstimme whether he planned to quit the CDU and join the AfD, he replied that this was currently “not my issue”.
There is also an old Friedrich Merz quote that could prove awkward for the party leadership. In December 2021, shortly before taking over the CDU, Merz told Der Spiegel that if anyone in the party raised a hand to cooperate with the AfD, “the next day there will be expulsion proceedings”. Prange has gone considerably further than raising his hand.
