John Jefferson
The national debate inside Germany is again fiercely focused on the country’s chaotic border and asylum policies. Conservatives are demanding changes, and Berlin’s far-left ruling coalition, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is reeling. Under pressure, Scholz has agreed to impose new measures on Germany’s national borders to check illegal immigration and undertake some modest deportations of foreign criminals.
As a Social Democrat (SPD), Scholz does not really want to make any changes. When it comes to illegal immigration, Scholz and his ruling coalition in Berlin typically claim that their hands are tied by European Union rules and their own (extreme) interpretation of the German constitution and national laws. The reality is, as with Democrats in Washington, they are also ideologically committed to immigration as a tool to gradually remake society. But they are now scrambling, and the new measures that Scholz reluctantly accepted could open the door to reforms in asylum policies and the return of illegal migrants that have consequences across Europe.
The opposition Christian Democrats (CDU), led by Friedrich Merz, launched a high-profile political effort that pushed Scholz’s shaky coalition to concede to the changes. How much the negotiations between Merz and Scholz represent a calculated insider deal to try to defuse the issue is open to speculation.
Disgruntlement among ordinary Germans caused by asylum-seekers and refugees has been building up for years. State and local authorities are overwhelmed in straining to accommodate more than 3.2 million foreigners. The public’s sense of insecurity is at unprecedentedly high levels, as German communities deal not only with Ukrainians, but many Muslim groups, particularly Afghans and Syrians, hostile to assimilation into Western traditions.
Close to half a million asylum applications are pending. Foreigners who have no right to stay (approaching a quarter of a million) are not compelled to leave the country. The authorities have failed to remove some 80 percent of those under deportation orders. “For every five deportations,” Merz complained, “there are 100 new arrivals.”
Germany’s total numbers are smaller than those in the United States, but the percentages are similar. Like Americans, Germans must endure imported migratory chaos and uncertainty created by a federal government more concerned about the interests of foreigners than its own nationals. The policies that brought it about in Germany are right out of the Biden-Harris asylum playbook: First, admit massive numbers who overwhelm the capacity of federal and local authorities to process, screen, and, as necessary, detain new arrivals. Create a cumbersome legal process that makes rapid adjudication of asylum applications impossible so that backlogs become unmanageable. Offer generous financial subsidies and issue public statements to encourage more to come. Refuse to deport or detain those who are ordered to leave. Denounce opposition politicians and citizens who fight against such irresponsible policies as “extremists” and “racists.”
In August, a Syrian asylum-seeker, under deportation orders that were not implemented, carried out a high-profile terrorist attack in Solingen, a small city in western Germany. The killer-terrorist, who later claimed he was working for ISIS, wielded a knife to murder three and injure eight at a local festival.
For many Germans, the Solingen attacks are part of increasing criminal activity across the country linked to Islamic extremists. Those motivated to carry out terrorist strikes often use knives as their weapons. In responding to the Solingen attack, government officials seriously argued that better knife control was the answer. For many Germans, this ridiculous response highlighted just how out of touch Scholz government officials are in dealing with an illegal migrant problem they created.
As in the U.S., experts in Germany argue much over the question of how much crime can be attributed to illegal migrants. Nevertheless, in one specific category—young foreign-born Muslim men—the statistics indicate, and most Germans believe, they cause crime way out of proportion to their numbers. Even Merz, as he denounced the Scholz government in his recent Bundestag speech, made reference to these problematic young men.
The timing of the duel between Merz and Scholz over Germany’s open borders is particularly noteworthy. The issue has been out there for years, and Merz has previously declined to engage at the level of his recent demands. The reason now for all the political fury, speechmaking, and modest policy changes is that both the CDU and the Berlin ruling coalition fear the elephant in the room: the “far-right” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose signature issue for a decade has been border security and immigration.
Recent state elections in Thuringia and Saxony, in which the AfD came in first and second place respectively, continue to rock the country’s political establishment. The AfD is also leading in upcoming state elections in Brandenburg, where German officialdom fears yet another hammer blow.
Virtually all of the political parties continue to stand by their pledge to build a firewall around the AfD and refuse to enter into coalition with it. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is still conducting officialdom’s lawfare against the AfD, classifying it as an “extremist” party based on contorted evidence and little due process.
Despite it all, polls indicate some 45 percent of CDU members are open to working with the AfD. But Merz, who is cut from the establishment conservative cloth of a Bush Republican, will not have it. “We cannot work with this party,” he announced. “That would kill the CDU. The destruction of the CDU is the goal of the AfD.”
Merz knows the CDU is on thin ice with conservative voters who remember that its last chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened Germany’s border in 2015 to over a million asylum-seekers. And AfD politicians never let voters forget it, a fact that no doubt stands out prominently in CDU internal polling. Presently, the AfD is scoring its high-profile successes in Germany’s eastern states, but it is approaching 22 percent in national polling, making it the second-strongest party in the country.
The AfD national leader Alice Weidel could not resist pointing out the flagrant hypocrisy. She reminded voters that when her party called for strong borders and deportations, German officialdom condemned it as pushing “extreme right” and “Nazi” policy. But when such demands come from the CDU, as Merz goes on the attack, the invective against the messenger suddenly ends, and the national debate actually takes up the merits of the policy.
Meanwhile in Berlin, Chancellor Scholz’s coalition, composed of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens, and Liberals (FDP), is politically fragile. On many issues, most prominently federal deficit spending, the ruling “Ampel” or “traffic-light” coalition (so-called because of the colors associated with the three parties—red, green, and yellow) is often dysfunctional.
Until now, the SPD, Greens, and FDP had somehow managed to close ranks behind their unpopular border and asylum policies. But that creaky unity appears now to be cracking. The FDP leader Christian Lindner knows his party is in dire straits. Polling indicates the FDP hardly reaches Germany’s 5 percent hurdle, which is the legal threshold required for a political party to enter any state legislature or the national Bundestag.
Lindner also knows his coalition partners’ extremism, particularly from the Greens, on open borders is unsustainable. He has praised Denmark’s model for controlling illegal immigration, which is considered hardline by many in Europe, and he has announced support for more border security:
Border controls are to be intensified in order to prevent people smuggling and illegal migration. To ensure that this happens quickly, I have decided that the [border patrol] will support this urgent task with 500 [additional] officials.
This is a red flag for Lindner’s partners in the coalition. Since the FDP desperately fears new national elections, it is unlikely that Lindner will crash the coalition over this issue. But it is an indication that Berlin, thanks more to the AfD than Merz, is finally breaking through in forcing some basic rethinking of Germany’s disastrous asylum and border policies.
Scholz’s big concern is that Germany’s new controls, that he has reluctantly authorized, will ultimately wreck the rules of the “Schengen Zone,” which allows free movement across national borders of European member states. But the Schengen Zone’s outer borders are failing to keep out illegal immigrants; without that control, Europe’s internal free-movement concept is doomed. Scholz also worries that a change in German policy could threaten the so-called Dublin Agreement, the European Union’s shaky consensus on processing asylum-seekers. These are all policies that the Europeans need to fundamentally reinvent. Changing Germany on borders will begin to change Europe on borders. Above all, Europe must finally end its foolish asylum concept that constantly attracts illegal economic migrants, ly young men, from Africa, Eurasia, and the Middle East to its frontiers. A hearty danke schön goes to the AfD.
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