Mary Dejevsky

Why won’t German politicians talk about migration?

For a country with a reputation for being staid and predictable, the election campaign that closes the Merkel era in Germany has not been without its dramas. 

The opening of the campaign coincided with a flood disaster in the north-west of the country, which propelled climate change to the top of the agenda. Then favourite and assumed Merkel-successor, Armin Laschet, was undone when he was caught on camera joshing with colleagues amid the human misery.

Then, earlier this month, police raided the offices of the finance and justice ministries as part of a money-laundering investigation that could harm the prospects of the current front-runner, the deputy chancellor, finance minister and Social-Democrat contender, Olaf Scholz.

These two subjects – climate and dirty money – have dominated the campaign leading up to polling day on Sunday. In the last television debate – or Triell, as they are being called this year, as the three leading candidates take part – was no exception. Laschet and the Green candidate, Annalena Baerbock, locked horns on climate; Scholz was put on the spot over money-laundering, and so the debate trundled on.

One subject, though, has been almost totally absent both from the debates and from the rest of the campaign, even though it started out as second only to climate in the list of voters’ concerns. This is migration – or ‘refugee policy’ (Fluechtlingspolitik), as it is mostly referred to in Germany. Reporting on the final debate, which took place on Sunday night, the popular Bild paper noted that ‘the important theme of migration was simply left out’.

As a visitor in Germany, it is also clear that migration has become a risky subject to discuss in public

This makes for quite a contrast with the last parliamentary elections four years ago, when Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million new arrivals during the 2015 refugee crisis may have cost her the best chance any recent German political leader has had to win an overall majority in the Bundestag.

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