Germany’s immigration meltdown
He came from Afghanistan through Bulgaria, where he had registered his claim for asylum. In 2022, he travelled through the EU’s open borders to Germany where he settled in the north-western Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. Last Wednesday, the man, now 28 years old, walked into a park in the city centre where he knifed a two-year-old boy to death, injured two other children, and then killed the 41-year-old man who had tried to stop him. He was finally intercepted by the police at a nearby rail track after a short chase.
The shocking attack has reignited the debate about immigration only weeks before the German federal elections on February 23, and exposed the weakness of its political elites. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU opposition and front-runner in the race to be chancellor, will propose legislation this week to permanently end free movement across all of Germany’s borders. Radical enough in itself, such a change would signal the end of the political firewall, or Brandmauer, his party had erected against the far-Right Alternative for Germany. The firewall is a pledge among the mainstream parties that there would be no co-operation with the AfD under any circumstances — no coalition, no confidence and supply agreement, and no joint legislation at federal level.
Previously, the CDU had rejected an offer from AfD co-leader Alice Weidel to vote together for a change in asylum policy, committing to pull its support for any law that would only pass with the votes of the AfD. Now things have changed. As Merz put it: “I am no longer willing to refrain from putting the right thing to the vote in the German Bundestag just because the wrong people might agree to it.”
Merz then went even further, doubling down with another pledge. He said, echoing Donald Trump, that if elected chancellor, he would pass an executive order on his first day in office to reintroduce border controls. German chancellors, however, are not as powerful as US presidents. Proportional representation means they have to co-opt other parties into coalitions. And there is no way that his potential centrist partners would accept such an executive order — the coalition would fracture on day one. And so the CDU leader has, effectively, erected a new firewall — this time against the other parties. There are only two scenarios whereby he could enact what he promises: either, he wins an absolute majority, which not a single German poll predicts. Or, he co-operates with the AfD.
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This seemingly local debate about immigration has important ramifications for the EU project as a whole. For if Merz were to re-introduce border controls, this would permanently end the EU’s Schengen passport-free travel system — one of the significant achievements of integration, along with the euro and the single market. If Germany were to resurrect passport controls to keep out refugees, all its immediate neighbours, and their neighbours, would have to do the same, because nobody wants to be stranded with its rejected refugees. Schengen — which includes 29 European countries — would collapse within hours. To solve the problem of illegal immigrants would require a fully functioning European immigration policy. There is no chance of that happening either. And so, for the EU, this would be worse than Brexit; it would mark the first step towards the disintegration of the entire EU project.
Friedrich Merz is an impulsive politician with lots of good ideas. He was enjoying a secure lead in the polls, strong on national security and on the economy. He is the only senior German politician who understands at a deep level that his country’s economic model is broken. A critic of Germany’s digital protectionism, he has a better grasp of 21st-century technologies than any of his peers. But nobody is talking about his ideas for economic transformation and innovation now because everybody is now talking about immigration and firewalls.
“For the EU, this would be worse than Brexit; it would mark the first step towards the disintegration of the entire EU project.”
Voters know that given Germany’s system of proportional representation, parties can promise whatever they want but it is the coalitions that decide. They also know that Merz will almost surely go into a coalition with a centrist party, like the Social Democrats or the Greens, neither of which support permanent border controls. If current polls are right, the CDU will have to govern with at least one of them, possibly both. The more parties, the harder the coalition talks will be, and the less of his agenda Merz will be able to implement.
There are moments in politics when politicians have to take big risks. But this was not one of them: it would have been enough for him to promise a review of immigration policies. When you make up policies on the hoof like this, people are bound to question your sincerity. After all, it was only a little over a week ago when he told a campaign rally to loud applause that “one 1933 is enough for Germany”. This was a reference to the year when Hitler came to power. He was essentially comparing the AfD to the Nazis. Until Wednesday, his firewall was a firmament of German politics. Today, people are no longer sure whether it still stands.
Austria just showed us how fast a firewall can crumble. The centre-right Austrian People’s Party had one in place against the far-Right Freedom Party, the winner in last year’s election. Karl Nehammer, the former Austrian chancellor and leader of the People’s Party, wanted to negotiate a “losers’ coalition” with the Social Democrats and a small liberal party. But the negotiations failed because Nehammer, like Merz, insisted on immigration policies that were tougher than the centrists could stomach. After the talks collapsed at the beginning of this month, Nehammer resigned both as chancellor and party chairman. His party has now agreed to collapse the firewall and form a coalition with the Freedom Party. Its leader, Herbert Kickl, will become the next chancellor.
What happened in Austria is that two competing red lines clashed. If Merz ended up in a position where he would need both the SPD and the Greens to form a coalition, there is no way he could implement his immigration policies. If as in Austria, the German negotiations also ended with no deal, then the only viable coalition option would be for the CDU to form a coalition with the AfD, or a minority government with the support of the AfD.
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Most probably, Merz’s high-risk gamble will end up with him having to eat his words and cobble together another centrist coalition with the same old parties and same old policies that failed in the past. In this scenario, the AfD would become the main opposition party, with a strong chance of winning the 2029 elections. Weidel would stand a good chance of becoming the next chancellor. In both scenarios the AfD wins.
But this iteration of the AfD is a far cry from the party which started out 12 years ago as a conservative-libertarian group, founded by economics professors who wanted Germany to leave the euro. Today, the professors are long gone, displaced by nationalists, including some who are close to the neo-Nazi movement. Weidel herself is not in that camp. But nor is she a Javier Milei or an Elon Musk. Weidel’s party, though popular with the younger generation — and with Musk, who appeared at an AfD rally at the weekend to decry multiculturalism — supports a return to Russian gas and heavy industry. The AfD may claim to understand new technology, but it is not a party of innovation.
My message to all libertarian conservatives, then, is to be careful what you wish for. The AfD is a party that would not have you as a member. But the increasingly desperate attempt to keep them away from power is what sits at the heart of Germany’s dysfunction and prevents it from addressing its economic paralysis.
Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have no firewalls. These countries are governed by coalitions of the centre-right and the far-Right. Austria will soon join them. It was a choice the voters in those countries have made. They will make other choices in the future. A firewall would have deprived them of the choice.
If as a German voter, you wanted change in economic policy, there is currently no path for such a preference to be implemented. No matter how you vote, you always end up with the same homogenised centrist policies. Ending the firewall is the only way to prise open the failing political cartel which has Germany — and the EU — in its suffocating grasp.
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