Dresden city council votes in favor of AfD motion on payment card

A clear crack in the much-cited firewall: Dresden City Council has approved an AfD motion to introduce a payment card for asylum seekers - also with votes from the CDU parliamentary group. This emerges from a recording of the city council meeting on Thursday evening. The decision was made by a narrow margin of 33 votes to 32. The FDP and Freie Wähler parliamentary groups also supported the motion. Before the vote, Thomas Lehmann from the CDU parliamentary group explained that his group also supported the motion because he feared that the introduction of a planned nationwide payment card could drag on for a long time.

Last year, CDU leader Friedrich Merz made it clear after a debate about the "firewall" to the AfD in local politics: "There will be no cooperation between the CDU and the AfD at local level either". Merz announced to the newspaper "Welt" that he wanted to take a close look at the situation in the Dresden City Council.

The AfD parliamentary group's proposal envisages a payment card replacing the current cash payments for asylum seekers in a pilot project. The card would only be used to make payments within Germany and there would be further restrictions on its use. The Saxon Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the state association of the AfD as "certainly right-wing extremist".

Although the federal government has passed a cabinet resolution on the payment card for refugees, it is unclear when the nationwide regulation will be passed in the Bundestag. In some federal states, individual municipalities have already gone ahead and introduced their own payment cards.