Two storeys high and visible from afar, a massive Friedrich Merz beams down like a benevolent father on those passing by the Berlin headquarters of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Germany chooses a new federal parliament on February 23rd, a process the 69-year-old hopes will end with his centre-right party in power and him as chancellor. The massive poster’s slogan reflects that hope, presenting the CDU’S Berlin base as a “House of Political Change”.
The protesters who assembled here on Wednesday evening agreed that this is a house of political change – just not the kind they want.
“For refugees this is a fatal signal because it shows where developments will go in the next weeks and months, towards ever-stronger restrictions,” said Wiebke Judith of the lobby group ProAsyl.
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On Wednesday the Bundestag backed, with a four-vote majority, non-binding CDU motions demanding the introduction of permanent border controls, a ban on anyone without valid ID entering the country, simpler deportation rules and pre-deportation detention for failed asylum seekers – indefinite for those who commit crimes.
Before the vote, Merz said his party had begun drafting its proposals after last August’s attacks in the western city of Solingen, where a failed Syrian asylum seeker is accused of fatally stabbing three people. Then came Magdeburg: after the December 20th attack on a Christmas market there, an Egyptian national is to face trial for killing six people with a rental car. The final shock came a week ago when two people, including a two-year-old boy, were fatally stabbed in a Bavarian playground. The suspect is a 28-year-old Afghan national with a history of mental illness, whose asylum application had been denied and whose deportation was overdue.
[ CDU leader signals radical shift on migration policy following killing of toddlerOpens in new window ]
Merz insisted his party’s proposals, to curb asylum rights and expedite deportations, were “right even if the wrong people vote for them”, a nod to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose promised support for the motions prompted uproar elsewhere in the Bundestag.
A furious chancellor Olaf Scholz, from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), accused CDU leader Merz of populist dog-whistle politics. Rather than acknowledge what he said were the real causes of the tragic attacks – mental illness and state failure to implement its own deportation rules – Merz was making promises at odds with national and European Union law, risking an EU migration asylum pact due next year.
In a joint statement before the vote, Germany’s Christian church leaders said they were “deeply disturbed by the timing and tone” of the migration proposals, fearing they “defame all migrants living in Germany, stir up prejudice and, in our opinion, don’t lead to a solution to the existing questions”.
When the CDU motions passed on Wednesday evening, by four votes, an eerie silence hung for a moment over the Bundestag chamber. Then AfD parliamentarians began applauding what they see as the first chink of light in the CDU’s so-called “firewall” against political co-operation with them.
“The CDU’s mask has fallen,” said Beatrix von Storch, a leading AfD politician. “They are copying the AfD completely so of course we back their motion.”
A poll on Wednesday evening showed two-thirds of voters remain opposed to formal pacts with the AfD. But on these hot-button migration proposals, opposition to accepting AfD support slid to 48 per cent – with 47 per cent in favour.
While Wednesday’s CDU motions were non-binding and unlikely to be implemented, a CDU draft Bill on Friday to boost police powers on borders may pass the Bundestag, again with AfD support. Given the Bill is unlikely to clear the Bundesrat upper house, however, some are wondering just what Merz is up to.
His conservative CDU allies see a high-risk game to win back both wobbling AfD voters and one in three undecided voters.
Worried CDU centrists, meanwhile, say this is exactly the kind of disaster they feared would happen with Merz as leader and why they tried three times – twice successfully – to thwart his ambitions.
On Thursday morning Angela Merkel, Merz’s political predecessor and long-time rival, issued a rare, terse statement. She recalled a promise by Merz when the Scholz government lost its majority last November to work with mainstream parties on legislation – and to not pass any proposals with AfD support.
“I think it is wrong not to feel bound by this any more,” she wrote, “and to allow, knowingly and for the first time, a majority for the first time in the German Bundestag with votes from the AfD.”
Then, on Thursday afternoon, 99-year-old Holocaust survivor Albrecht Weinberg joined the debate. He has vowed to return his federal cross of merit – Germany’s highest civilian honour – in protest at “how something like this can happen after everything that has happened”.
After watching the rise of the Nazis 92 years ago, assisted by mainstream conservatives, he warned: “I can see events of my youth playing in front of my eyes again.”
