The Federal Republic is on an economic crash course. A return to a market economy seems impossible as long as an oversized party cartel rigidly defends the course of the green transformation. The relaxation of the moral contact ban with the AfD by the Association of Family Businesses could now expose the ideological devastation of this path.

Marie-Christine Ostermann has been president of the business association Die Familienunternehmer (Association of Family Businesses) since 2023. In recent days, the 47-year-old entrepreneur has achieved something many observers of Germany’s economic decline have been waiting for: she has effectively abolished the contact ban toward the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a ban that the political-media establishment has enforced with iron discipline.

Return to Open Discourse

At its core, Ostermann decided something that should be self-evident in a parliamentary democracy: a return to open dialogue. In early October, she invited AfD parliamentarians for the first time to a parliamentary evening hosted by her association — together with representatives of other parties.

This is how things normally work when an association claims political neutrality for itself. Ostermann justified this step by explaining that the strategy of total exclusion had not weakened the AfD. The party must now be confronted with arguments, not isolation.

This is actually a banality: the AfD — especially in economic policy — offers, alongside the radically socialist positions of the Left Party, the only order-policy counterposition to the eco-socialist course pursued by the federal government and its predecessor coalitions.

Criticism From Within

Reflexively, the large state chapter of North Rhine-Westphalia distanced itself from its president. Especially in Düsseldorf, a red-green ideological logjam prevails, embodied by CDU state leader Hendrik Wüst, who has shown like few others that the Christian Democrats have long been under the influence of the green transformation agenda. They act as ideological absorption bodies for Brussels’ “Green Deal,” which they have translated into political action since the Merkel years — to the delight of the Left.

Whether debt policies, the heating law, the hydrogen ramp-up, the combustion-engine ban, or the absurd extortion over CO₂ emissions — the CDU/CSU is always on board when it comes to strangling the economy and making the citizen pay.

Ostermann now stands alone in the firestorm of a toxic debate that, on the surface, aims to sterilize the AfD as a growing opposition but, beneath the surface, attempts to suppress the truth about the failed mega-project of green transformation.

First Cracks in the Foundation

At least the Central Association of the German Baking Trade and the Family Businesses Land and Forest (FABLF) also spoke out on Wednesday in favor of an open approach to the AfD. Both organizations stressed that economic associations must act impartially and engage with all democratically elected parties in order to properly represent the interests of their members — an aspect often ignored in the debate over the political firewall against the AfD.

Large parts of German business are too deeply entangled in the subsidy machinery of green patronage economics to face the truth: green central planning is destroying the foundation of the economy. The doctrine of pure market economy would be the truly ethical position for politically neutral organizations. Everything else leads to corporatism, extraction mentality, and entrepreneurial dependence on state redistribution.

Excluding the AfD from economic-policy discourse cannot be justified even by simple democratic principles. More than a quarter of voters would now cast their ballots for the party — regardless of the pompous moralizing of the federal president or the moral front-line speeches of the chancellor.

Well-Founded Criticism

A mere glance at Germany’s permanent recession, accelerated deindustrialization, and the associated capital flight away from an overpriced, overregulated business location shows: Ostermann’s move was years overdue. Her courageous action mercilessly exposes the failures of Germany’s economic elites. For years, not only corporate leaders but also representatives of business associations and the economic press have remained silent — about the true background and scale of the crisis.

The golden calf of man-made climate change through CO₂ emissions was never allowed to be questioned — until U.S. President Donald J. Trump finally dealt the narrative its death blow, burying the era of eco-socialist mismanagement, at least in the United States.

Only in recent weeks have the first critical voices emerged — from the automotive industry with Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group; from the chemical sector with Christian Kullmann, CEO of Evonik Industries; and even from the trade unions, such as IG BCE under Michael Vassiliadis. All of them, for the first time, have taken aim at the Green Deal and centrally planned green transformation in view of the catastrophic state of German industry.

Yet even they avoided, at all costs, discussing the corresponding AfD positions, which stand diametrically opposed to the policies of Brussels and Berlin. The AfD advocates market liberalization, a return to the social market economy, and an end to grotesque climate regulation.

Maximum Reality Distortion

In the coming weeks, we will see how the political-media establishment will attempt to defend the hitherto almost immunized green transformation with all remaining media firepower. The withdrawals of Rossmann and Vorwerk from the Association of Family Businesses show how great the fear of media stigmatization runs in German business circles.

And as if anticipating it, Verdi chairman Frank Werneke opened the hunt for dissidents on Thursday morning with a bizarre and irresponsible historical comparison.

Together with the DGB, he warned that Die Familienunternehmer now risk drifting to the right. Werneke invoked Adolf Hitler’s secret 1933 meeting with industrialists — the decisive turning point toward the end of the Weimar Republic.

One must resist the beginnings, Werneke argued, sharply condemning the end of the contact ban toward the AfD, which he considers deeply anti-democratic and dangerous for both Germany’s economic prospects and social cohesion in Europe. He called on all business and employer associations to take a firm stand against any form of rapprochement with the AfD.

The End of Immunization

With this, Verdi has chosen the sharpest rhetorical weapon — placing Ostermann and Die Familienunternehmer directly in the shadow of right-wing fascism.

But Werneke & Co. will soon face a surprise when they realize that the national-conservative movement in Europe — whether Fidesz in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, or the new Polish government — is gaining significant wind in its sails. A growing number of EU citizens see a return to national sovereignty and opposition to climate policy and the expanding Brussels surveillance apparatus as a path out of the current crisis. And many union members are likely to feel the same way.

Verdi’s frantic defensive line shows where the discourse is headed in the coming weeks. With maximum media force, the strategy of excluding undesirable political opinions will be defended — solely to avoid an honest reckoning with the failed eco-socialist policies that have plunged the country into its worst economic crisis since the end of World War II.

But now the train has left the station. Hundreds of thousands have lost their livelihoods in recent years — all in the name of the green god, whose following is fading. And politics will not succeed in rehabilitating the narrative of man-made, CO₂-based climate change to suppress, once again, both the dialogue with the AfD and the critical debate on the Green Deal.

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Thomas Kolbe, born in 1978 in Neuss/ Germany, is a graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination