The 2020 Thuringian government crisis, also known as the Thuringia crisis, was triggered by the election of Thomas Kemmerich (FDP) as Thuringian Minister President with votes from the AfD, CDU and FDP on 5 February 2020. The election attracted considerable national and international attention because, for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, a Minister President was elected with votes from a far-right populist party, in this case the AfD.
On 8 February 2020, Kemmerich resigned and served in an acting fashion until Bodo Ramelow was elected Minister President on 4 March 2020. After Kemmerich's election, no members were appointed to the Bundesrat, and he himself also decided not to represent Thuringia there. For four weeks thereafter, the Thuringian State Government consisted only of the Minister President. Kemmerich was accused of neglecting participation in government business.
The crisis was also a consequence of the 2019 Thuringian state election, in which no established government coalition in Germany won a majority. Following Kemmerich's controversial election, federal CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced her resignation, as did Mike Mohring, the Thuringian CDU state and parliamentary group leader; Christian Hirte, Commissioner of the Federal Government for the New States, was dismissed, and the FDP failed to clear the 5 percent threshold in the 2020 Hamburg state election.
2019 Thuringian state election
Initial situation
Before the October 2019 election, the Left party, led by Minister President Bodo Ramelow, was in power in a red-red-green coalition state government. After the election, the Left remained the strongest force in parliament, but the coalition no longer held an absolute majority of seats in parliament. The CDU and FDP proposed a so-called "Zimbabwe" coalition (black-red-yellow-green), but this also failed to gain a majority. Since none of the parties represented in the state parliament wanted to enter into negotiations with the AfD faction led by Björn Höcke, there was little prospect of a government coalition with a parliamentary majority. The only theoretical majority alliances publicly discussed by at least one party were red-red-green plus FDP and a coalition of The Left with the CDU. In the run-up to the elections, the media also discussed the possibility that Bodo Ramelow could only continue to hold the office of Minister President in an acting fashion, without a new parliamentary election.
Cooperation talks
The Thuringian CDU showed internal disagreement after the state elections in 2019. While two members of the Landtag and some local politicians proposed a rapprochement with the AfD, others favored talks with the former Minister President Bodo Ramelow. These included Mike Mohring, the state chairman of the CDU in Thuringia. At the end of October, he visited the federal chairwoman of the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, with the intention of meeting with Ramelow afterwards. She reminded him that the CDU continued to consider the "incompatibility of cooperation with the Left Party" and that Mohring's contact with Ramelow was only a "parliamentary matter of course."
Already at the end of October, the FDP stated that it would not form a coalition with either the AfD or the Left Party.
A meeting between Ramelow and Mohring on 12 January 2020 yielded no new insights into how and whether the parliamentary opposition could support Ramelow, nor did a meeting between politicians from all state parliamentary factions except the AfD on 13 January 2020.
After the election, Minister President Bodo Ramelow declared that he, with the support of the Left Party, would fight for a continuation of the red-red-green coalition. The three previous governing parties signed a government treaty on 4 February to continue the red-red-green alliance as a minority government. The parties involved relied on situational parliamentary cooperation with the CDU and the FDP.
Election of the Minister President in February 2020
Nomination of the candidates
The Left Party, the SPD and the Greens nominated the incumbent Minister President Bodo Ramelow as their candidate. CDU and FDP had no candidate as they had no majority of their own, and did not want to get elected with AfD support.
The AfD faction proposed a largely unknown candidate, Christoph Kindervater, the part time mayor of small village Sundhausen. Kindervater had previously made his mark by writing a letter to the members of the CDU, FDP and AfD factions of parliament in order to run for the office of Minister President in Thuringia. He had run for the Unstrut-Hainich district council in 2019 on the CDU list and called himself a supporter of the Values Union, then still part of CDU.
The FDP faction decided to let their faction and state chairman Thomas Kemmerich run in the third ballot, if Bodo Ramelow failed twice before. According to their own statements, this was rather a symbolic candidacy to offer a "civic alternative" to the two candidates from left and right. However, they only wanted to run if the AfD continued to send its own candidate in order to avoid receiving votes from the AfD, because they assumed that the AfD would continue to vote for its own candidate. The day after the election, Kemmerich admitted in an interview in Heute Journal that the opposite should have been expected. However, the FDP ruled out cooperation or agreement with the AfD at any time. At the same time, there was no plan for the next steps in the formation of a government.
In the days leading up to the election, the press sometimes discussed the possibility "that a candidate from the CDU or FDP could win in the third round of voting with the support of the AfD". On the day before the election, Wolfgang Tiefensee, head of the SPD in Thuringia, warned the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper that such a "dam burst" would be "a serious damage to democracy" and as such would "radiate far beyond Germany." In the FDP parliamentary group in the Bundestag, the situation in Thuringia was briefly discussed before the election and Christian Lindner warned against being dependent on votes from the AfD, but the representative of the FDP Thuringia pointed out that this was an internal matter. Moreover, according to his own statements, nobody had expected that the AfD would not vote for its own candidate. According to media reports, however, CDU federal chair Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had asked FDP state leader Mohring and Lindner for Kemmerich not to run.
Election of Kemmerich as Minister President
The Thuringian constitution provides that in the first two rounds of voting, the Minister President is elected by an absolute majority of the members of the state parliament. If this does not succeed, the third round of voting takes place. In this round, the candidate with the most votes is considered elected. Whether a Minister President with fewer yes votes than no votes can be elected is disputed.
In the first round of voting, Bodo Ramelow won 43 votes, one more than the Left, SPD and Greens had combined in seats. Christoph Kindervater received 25 votes and thus at least three votes from outside the AfD. 22 members of the Landtag abstained. This made a second round of voting necessary, as both candidates had missed the absolute majority of 46 votes. In the second round of voting, Ramelow received 44 votes and Kindervater 22 votes, which corresponded exactly to the number of AfD deputies. 24 members of the Landtag abstained from voting.
For the third round of voting which was necessary as a result, the AfD faction maintained Kindervater's candidacy, and in addition, as announced for this case, Thomas Kemmerich was nominated by the FDP faction. Kemmerich received 45 votes, Bodo Ramelow 44 and Kindervater 0 votes, one Member abstained. Kemmerich was thus elected the new Thuringian Minister President. The result of the secret ballot shows that the AfD had apparently voted unanimously for Kemmerich despite Kindervater's candidacy being upheld, along with most of the FDP and CDU members of parliament. This tactical approach was later confirmed by the AfD.
Kemmerich accepted the election without hesitation and was sworn in. Later, Christian Lindner justified this by saying that Kemmerich had been "overwhelmed" by the situation. After Reinhold Maier, he was thus the second elected FDP Minister President of a state in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, but at the same time the first Minister President ever to come from the ranks of the smallest parliamentary group in the Landtag and to rely on votes from the AfD for his election. In terms of electoral law, the election of the Minister President was formally flawless; however, there was a consensus between the Union parties and the FDP on the one hand and the Left, SPD and Greens on the other hand, both in Thuringia and throughout Germany, not to enter into a coalition with the AfD, led in Thuringia by Björn Höcke, a politician considered by most to be on the extreme right-wing.
Immediately after the election, Kemmerich again ruled out any cooperation with the AfD and instead offered the CDU, SPD and Greens to form a non-partisan cabinet together. However, this was immediately rejected by them. Instead, the previous red-red-green coalition gave him an ultimatum to resign. Even together with the CDU, SPD and Greens, the FDP would have only had 39 of the 90 seats in the state parliament anyway. Kemmerich renounced the subsequently planned appointment of ministers and requested on behalf of the FDP faction that the state parliament session be adjourned indefinitely. This was granted with the votes of AfD, CDU and FDP, against the votes of Left, SPD and Greens.
Government management
The ministers of the acting Ramelow cabinet resigned from their posts when Kemmerich took office. Since Kemmerich did not appoint any new ministers, he was the only member of the state government. The ministries were temporarily headed by the state secretaries appointed under Ramelow, and there were no cabinet meetings.
No members were appointed to the Bundesrat, and no representative of Thuringia was present at the only meeting of the Bundesrat during Kemmerich' short term. The Conference of Interior Ministers, which had been chaired by Georg Maier, Thuringia's Minister of the Interior, since the beginning of 2020, was temporarily returned to its previous chairman, Hans-Joachim Grote (Minister of the Interior of Schleswig-Holstein).
According to state law experts Michael Meier and Robert Wille (research assistants at the University of Potsdam) and Matthias Friehe (EBS University), the ministers of the Ramelow cabinet continued to hold executive office from a legal point of view, as the Thuringian state constitution stipulates that ministers continue their activities until their successors take office. The State Secretaries remained in office:
Reception
Politicians
After the swearing-in, the leader of the Left parliamentary group, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, refused to shake hands with Thomas Kemmerich and threw the bouquet of flowers intended for Ramelow at his feet. During his inaugural speech, the Left party shouted "charlatan" and "hypocrite" while demonstrators spontaneously gathered in front of the parliament building and the FDP party headquarters in Berlin.
Ramelow submitted a tweet on the day he was voted out of office, drawing parallels with the formation of the Baum-Frick government in Thuringia in 1930. This tweet was controversially received, as it was illustrated by a photo of Höcke congratulating Kemmerich and of Hitler bowing to Reich President von Hindenburg on the so-called Day of Potsdam in 1933, and was deleted after a few days.
Stefan Möller, spokesman for the AfD Thuringia, said of the election process: "That was the whole point of the strategy. So we tried to lure Mr Kemmerich onto the podium as the opposing candidate. That is what he did. And then we elected him according to plan."
Outside of Thuringia, Kemmerich's election initially met with spontaneous approval from right-wing groups, especially from the AfD, the conservative Values Union, and parts of the FDP. Initially, the deputy federal chairman of the FDP, Wolfgang Kubicki, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that he was delighted that "a candidate from the democratic centre" had won, in view of the decision of the "majority of members in the Thuringian state parliament". He said he saw this as an opportunity to "promote a sensible policy for Thuringia." That same evening, FDP party leader Christian Lindner declared: "Who [...] supports our candidates in a secret ballot is not in our power." AfD party leader Jörg Meuthen wrote that the result was the "first piece of the mosaic of the political turnaround in Germany."
However, the election results and Kemmerich's acceptance of the election soon caused a considerable stir nationwide, as well as criticism from top politicians, including the FDP. Current and former leading FDP politicians such as Gerhart Baum, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Alexander Lambsdorff and Joachim Stamp demanded his immediate resignation. Christian Lindner also finally asked him to resign, describing it as a mistake "to have accepted an election under these conditions". He emphasized that there would be "no cooperation with the FDP that was intended and negotiated, but also not accidentally, by mistaken [sic] with the AfD."