CSU veteran Gauweiler pushes for centre-right alliance with Free Voters
Former CSU deputy leader Peter Gauweiler has urged his party to deepen its ties with the Free Voters' Association (Freie Wähler) and contest elections outside Bavaria as part of a joint alliance. "The Free Voters and the CSU should be able to stand together beyond the Free State as a proven Bavarian success story," Gauweiler told the Mediengruppe Bayern (Tuesday edition). "If the CSU follows the model of Alliance 90/The Greens by enabling joint lists—such as a Free Voters/CSU coalition—overcoming the five-percent threshold would no longer be unlikely but entirely plausible."
He described this as "just an idea," adding: "The alternative is to abandon all strategic imagination and then act surprised when the bourgeois camp is taken over by activist fringe groups."
Gauweiler estimates that a center-right "political sentiment" could capture two-thirds of the electorate. The goal, he said, should be "to put an end to the absurdity of Germans voting for the right but being governed by the left." If not an alliance with the Free Voters, the CSU could also consider running independently outside Bavaria, he suggested.
He remains skeptical of erecting a rigid firewall against the far-right AfD. "Firewalls are no substitute for arguments. The very metaphor—consigning objectionable ideas to the flames—is indefensible," Gauweiler argued. What matters to him, he said, is not so much a person's ideology "if they are willing to engage in open dialogue. The exchange of ideas has value in itself."
He also called it "democratically dishonest to reject parliamentary proposals solely because they come from the wrong party." During his time in the Bundestag, the CSU politician said he had supported motions from the Left Party "when I deemed it appropriate, and I would do the same with the AfD if the circumstances warranted it."
Gauweiler served as a state secretary in the Bavarian Interior Ministry under Franz Josef Strauss and later as Bavarian environment minister under Edmund Stoiber. A long-time CSU member of both the state and federal parliaments, he was long regarded as the party's conservative conscience.
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