Bavaria and the Crown crisis: the opposition is waking up

WI would say the goods war: the front of the house is crumbling a bit, even in Bavaria. About four weeks ago, Prime Minister Markus Söder made a government statement before the state parliament, and the opposition continued, as they say then, on “state responsibility”. That was even true for the AfD, whose leader of the parliamentary group Ingo Hahn promised “full help.” The inter-fractional application of the new Infection Protection Law is likely to have had a positive impact on cooperation: the CSU also included many of the demands of the other parties.

Since then, debates about the correct strategy to deal with the coronavirus have become more diverse. The state government and its authorities also face attacks and questions. One of them: Why might strong beer festivals be held on the second weekend of March, when the move to Nockherberg was decided on the urgent recommendation of the State Office of Food Safety and Health, which Söder himself recently called “food centers virus”?

CSU Boost

However, the latest surveys speak clear language. CSU and Söder have earned a tremendous reputation as a result of the crisis and its management. According to Radio Bavarian’s Bavarian trend, the CSU is 49 percent, the best value since 2014.

All the other games had to fall: the Greens fell eight percentage points to 17, the AfDs four to six. Free voters, partners in the CSU coalition, lost two percent and now have eight. That means: “constructive action” has not separated anyone from the CSU, at least not in the polls. And so it is, as is almost always the case in crises: at some point, party policy, which is not a bad thing, opens the way. This was already evident Monday in the state parliament, in the debate after the Söder government’s second statement on Corona.

In the AfD, an internal party clarification process had evidently been carried out: the business liberals, who were heard criticizing the closure from the beginning, prevailed against the authoritarians. In her speech, Co-President Katrin Ebner-Steiner, who had actually been one of the authoritarians in this debate, linked criticism that “all possible fundamental rights would be suspended” to the classic AfD theme: but at the same time, the right Asylum applies without limitation

She made an accusation that is heard more frequently today: that the local elections on March 15 were “demonstrably a massive source of infection for our citizens.” The Interior Ministry told the F.A.Z. again as “unsubstantiated”: the reported number of people infected with a crown had increased in Bavaria “as in all major federal states affected, since around March 9, six days before local elections.” The State Office of Health announced that the effects of local elections on the number of registrations could have been expected up to two weeks after the elections. During the period, “the contagion dynamics decreased considerably”.