The German Establishment’s Last Chance Immigration drove Germans to the polls in record numbers, and it doubled the AfD’s vote share. Is the next chancellor listening? Christopher Caldwell
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-german-establishments-last-chance
The winner of Sunday’s German elections has been known for months, almost since the outgoing government, led by Social Democrats and dominated by Greens, collapsed last November. As expected, Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats have finished on top, albeit with a flabbier than foreseen 29 percent of the vote.
Out of power since Merz’s intraparty rival Angela Merkel stepped down in 2021, the center-right party is back. But that prospect is not why 83 percent of voters—the highest turnout in the history of post–Cold War Germany—thronged the polls on Sunday.
German voters have decided that stopping mass immigration, legal and illegal, is a national emergency. And the party addressing it most directly is the Alternative for Germany. The so-called AfD finished second with 21 percent of the vote, doubling its share of seats. But many on the country’s center and left claim it is exactly the kind of party the country’s post-Nazi constitutional order is meant to exclude.
The 69-year-old Merz comes to power in a tricky position. He was a star of the Christian Democratic party in the old days, until Merkel bested him for the leadership at the turn of the century and sent him into banking-industry exile. Now, it would seem, a majority of Germans want him to carry out the AfD’s policies—but without the AfD. How? The question will be hard to resolve within the highly regulated (some would say semi-) democracy that Germany has been since the Second World War.
Germany is getting less efficient. Its railroads, despite the stereotypes, are among the least punctual in Europe—only 31 percent of its intercity trains arrive on time. It is getting poorer, too: The German economy has shrunk two years in a row. Volkswagen, Bosch, and other industrial giants have laid off tens of thousands of employees. And for years, Germany’s American ally has been raising the price of its decades-old alliance. First Germany was supposed to trade less with China. Then, once Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Amis demanded a boycott of Russian gas. Now Donald Trump is calling for a doubling of the country’s defense expenditures.
But the issue that has come to symbolize all these problems is migration. Germany’s foreign-born population has risen by millions since Merkel announced she would welcome refugees from the Syrian civil war in 2015. Assimilation has been difficult, as the buildup to election day made clear.
Immigrants have lately committed a succession of macabre murders: In August, a Syrian refugee stabbed three people to death in Solingen (the knife-making capital of Germany, as it happens). In December, six were killed and hundreds injured when a Saudi-born man drove his car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg. In January, a 2-year-old baby was stabbed to death by an Afghan refugee in a park in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. He also killed a 41-year-old passerby. On the Friday night before the election, a 19-year-old Syrian stabbed a Spanish tourist in the neck at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Only the AfD has been willing to talk about these things bluntly. At its convention in January, chancellor candidate Alice Weidel devoted much of her speech to the crimes of migrants. “No one ever discusses, my dear friends, who the attackers are.” Her approach on the campaign trail recalls that of Donald Trump discussing Laken Riley and other victims of migrant crime. Later in the speech she promised: “We’re going to close all the gender studies departments and throw the professors out.” Weidel is an investment banker, a fluent Mandarin speaker, and a lesbian. The last of these attributes led Elon Musk, a Weidel fan, to absolve her of any suspicion of extremism. “Does that sound like Hitler to you?” he asked in December.
The German political system has not been so forgiving. Parts of the AfD are under government surveillance. Perhaps the most notorious party member, Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia, was fined by a court for having used the expression Alles für Deutschland (“Everything for Germany”), banned for its association with the storm troopers who aided Hitler’s rise in the 1920s. The episode is considered a humorous anecdote in parts of the party: “Alice für Deutschland,” you can read on some of Weidel’s campaign posters. Other parties have over the years constructed a so-called Brandmauer—a “firewall” against cooperating with the AfD in any way. Whether this is healthy vigilance or cynical collusion is an open constitutional question. Germans are less preoccupied with free speech than other Europeans, and the AfD was tarred as “extremist” even when it was founded by a bunch of university macroeconomists in 2013 to protest Germany’s policy in the Euro crisis.
For now it poses a problem for Merz, who tends to be a man of the establishment. Germany’s immigration crisis has its roots in the policies of Merkel, his fellow Christian Democrat. Rather like the Tory Remainers who nearly derailed Brexit before 2019, a hard core of pro-migration Christian Democrats are kicking against Merz’s change, of course. His political survival now requires him to vie with the AfD as an opponent of migration, while keeping intact the stigma against the AfD that may be his party’s main political asset. His attempts to square that circle provided most of the campaign’s drama. The AfD pointed out that if Merz really was serious about maintaining the “firewall,” then his anti-immigration policies were a pose, since the votes to carry them out were not available elsewhere.
Merz performed a bold maneuver in late January meant to shore up his support. In the wake of the killing of the 2-year-old in Aschaffenburg, he advanced two resolutions and one piece of legislation to toughen up migration laws. He said he did not care whose votes were needed to pass them—an implicit invitation of AfD votes, a suspension of the Brandmauer. One of the resolutions—supporting the principle of rapid expulsions of migrants without a claim to stay in Germany—passed. The legislation, which would have tightened criteria for family reunification, failed.
It was hard to discern a principle behind this opening to the AfD—especially when Merz announced he wouldn’t form a government with the AfD, ever. Asked at a debate last week what he would do with the 40,000 foreigners who have no right to be on German soil, he replied, “Of course, we can’t arrest them all.” This contradicted the resolution that his party and the AfD had passed, which said that such people “would be taken directly into custody.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s pro-establishment paper of record, mocked Merz’s hypocrisy. But in this case, perhaps hypocrisy is what the public wants out of Merz.
On Sunday, two robust anti-immigration parties—the free market Free Democrats and the old left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—fell just a whisker short of the 5 percent hurdle to make it into parliament. Between the two of them, a tenth of the electorate will go unrepresented in this Bundestag.
Merz’s overture to the AfD brought a whole generation of young “anti-fascists” into the streets in a way that gave many Germans pause. This in turn breathed new life into the German Linke (or Left) party, which had been given up for dead but ended up with 9 percent of the vote. These developments are going to raise the temperature of Merz’s opposition.
The most significant result is that the AfD finished second. In every German election since World War II, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have finished 1–2, outpacing all other parties by a mile. This time outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats fell to barely 16 percent of the vote. That changes the landscape of the Bundestag. Together, the Christian Democrats and the AfD would have enough seats to solve Germany’s immigration problem in short order. The mathematical possibility of such a coalition is now staring the public in the face, even if Merz is resolved not to form it.
Merz does seem changed by the events of the campaign. As the last votes were counted, he complained about Trump and Musk’s interventions in it. A NATO cheerleader for his whole career, Merz now assured a TV audience: “Step by step, we can achieve independence from the USA.” He added: “I would not have believed that I would ever have to say such a thing on a television broadcast.”
If the real purpose of this election was to determine whether the Germany system can resolve its migration and other problems without the AfD, then there is a silver lining for the establishment.
Weak though the Social Democrats’ showing was, they won enough seats to join Merz in a two-party “Grand Coalition”—the form that Merkel’s government took in three of her four terms. Granted, it would be an unusually frail version of such a coalition, commanding the loyalty of only 45 percent of voters. The stakes could hardly be higher: Such a deal would give the two parties that have been up till now the pillars of Germany’s postwar establishment one last chance to come up with a solution to Germany’s problems. A failure would vindicate the AfD’s claim that Merz cannot solve the immigration problem because his ties to the system mean more to him than his ties to the voters. That would have consequences for the ways Germans talk about democracy—and the way they practice it.
Christopher Caldwell is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe and, most recently, The Age of Entitlement.
Comments are closed.
