Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate of Germany’s Christian Democrats, stumbled in his bid to end Social Democrat-Greens domination of migration policy. After winning a Bundestag motion to reinstate border controls with votes of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the chamber rejected a law on to clamp down on migration.
Merz’s use of the AfD drew the ire of ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, his predecessor as CDU leader. Her stunning public stand against Merz may have convinced 12 members of his own bloc to vote against the law. The bill was defeated on Friday with 350 members voting ‘no’ and 338 in favour.
The icy enmity between Merkel and Merz is legendary
“This result creates clarity on where we stand (on migration) and where the SPD and the Greens stand,” Merz said after the vote, adding that reducing migrant numbers would be a priority after the 23 February elections. “The asylum reversal failed today because of the SPD and Greens.”
Commenting on the defeat of Merz’s law, Phoenix TV Bundestag reporter, Gerd-Joachim von Fallois, said the real message was that “all the political parties of the centre were losers.”
By relying on AfD support, Merz crushed the “Brandmauer,” or firewall, that informally prohibited centre-left and centre-right parties from using AfD votes to get measures passed.
Merz, whose Christian Democratic bloc leads all opinion polls, has been scoring points campaigning on the ailing German economy, which is voters’ top concern. Opening a migration front had been Merz’s bid for a pincer assault on Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz amid outrage over a knife attack on a nursery group in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg on 22 January, allegedly by a failed Afghan asylum seeker. A two-year old boy, and a man who tried to protect the children, died in the attack.
Merkel, who has kept a low profile since she left office in 2021, waded into the debate by criticising any reliance on the AfD as ‘wrong.’ Targeting Merz, whom she demoted and drove out of politics two decades ago, Merkel said migration must be addressed “not with tactical manoeuvres, but honestly in substance, moderate in tone and on the basis of applicable European law.” Her message between the lines: Merz is doing none of these things.
The former German leader is defending her legacy. It was Merkel who threw open German borders to migrants in 2015, letting in over a million people, in some cases with little to no vetting. This move revived an almost politically dead AfD, which refashioned itself as an anti-migrant party and soared in popularity.
The icy enmity between Merkel and Merz is legendary, but it’s unprecedented for an ex-CDU leader to publicly seek to destroy a successor shortly before election day.
Still, Merkel’s reputation has taken a beating, so it’s unclear what further impact her words will have on voters. True, they are a gift to Scholz’s SPD and the Greens. And her concerns may influence CDU ‘wets,’ who already had the heebie-jeebies about Merz, as well as women who polls show are not taking a shine to him.
But as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung’s editor-in-chief for Germany, Marc Felix Serrao, noted on X, Merkel’s remarks may backfire and ‘are likely to encourage many Germans to vote for the CDU.’
This may be the case. A poll on 30 January showed voters overwhelmingly back Merz. Some 67 per cent called on Scholz’s SPD to support the Merz bill – defeated with SPD help on Friday – that was aimed at cutting migration to Germany by reducing family reunification and giving the federal police more powers. The INSA poll for Bild newspaper reveals that even 51 per cent of SPD voters support Merz, with an overall 76 per cent saying Scholz’s migration polices are “rather bad.”
Merz’s earlier non-binding motion, narrowly passed by the Bundestag on 29 January, criticised ‘clearly dysfunctional’ European Union rules on migration and said Germany must re-establish permanent controls on all its borders and block anyone lacking valid entry documents. His Christian Democrats, the AfD and the liberal Free Democrats, who were kicked out of Chancellor Scholz’s government last year triggering early elections, all voted in favour of the measure. The SPD and Greens voted against it.
As with Richard Nixon, Merz believes there is a ‘silent majority’ in Germany that’s on his side
Following the Aschaffenburg attack, Merz said he didn’t care what parties to the left or the right of his CDU did and that he would back all measures he now deems necessary. As with Richard Nixon, Merz believes there is a ‘silent majority’ in Germany that’s on his side and that things demanded by the media-political bubble in Berlin are often contrary to the wishes of ordinary voters.
‘How many more people have to be murdered?’ said Merz in his speech to the Bundestag, which was also a reference to the December Christmas market attack with an SUV in Magdeburg, allegedly by a Saudi man, that killed six people and injured hundreds, and a series of other earlier attacks by migrants and Islamists.
The squeals from the SPD and Greens have been so loud because their decades-long veto – the SPD ruled with Merkel for 12 of the 16 years she was in power – and moral high ground on migration-policy changes have now been lost. Merz ended a taboo by effectively saying that just because some of the wrong people support something doesn’t make it wrong.
“Following these attacks … I am not willing to allow the SPD and the Greens to decide which laws we put forward in the Bundestag and which laws we don’t,” Merz said after defeat of his bill.
Merz angered AfD leaders by inserting language in the motion accusing the party of using migration ‘to stir up xenophobia and spread conspiracy theories.’ The AfD ‘is not a partner, but our political opponent,’ the motion says. But AfD parliamentarians swallowed the insult, voted in favour and cheered when it passed. ‘Now and here begins a new era,’ said the party’s parliamentary secretary, Bernd Baumann.
To be sure, there remain risks for Merz. He’s consistently far ahead in the polls at about 30 per cent. The AfD is in second place with around 20 per cent and Scholz’s SPD is at 16 per cent. We’re just three weeks from election day, and Merz was almost already sitting in the Berlin chancellery. So, it can be asked, why did Merz take this risk? And why is he alienating his most likely coalition partner, the SPD? The answer is that, given the deep unpopularity of Scholz’s government, the Christian Democrats should be far higher in the polls. Merz has decided on a final roll of the dice.
The lesser danger may be Merz losing moderate CDU voters. What could truly go wrong is that his gambit shows a vote for the AfD is no longer wasted on a toothless opposition with no means to influence policy.
Merz will likely stay true to his vow of no coalitions with the AfD. But potential voters may now view a turbo-charged AfD as the best way to influence a Christian Democratic Chancellor Merz to pass tougher anti-migration and other measures with informal AfD support in the next Bundestag.
This is the genie that Merz has allowed out of the bottle. As Goethe wrote in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: ‘The spirits I call / I can’t get rid of now.’
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