By Sarah Marsh and Andreas Rinke
BERLIN (Reuters) – German opposition leader Friedrich Merz said he would seek to pass a disputed migration measure in parliament next week with any party willing to back it, a move critics say could break the firewall with the far right weeks before a federal election.
Merz, chancellor candidate for the two allied conservative parties (CDU/CSU) who are leading polls ahead of the election on Feb. 23, has long ruled out forming a coalition with the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), deeming them too extreme.
He has, however, shifted the conservatives’ stance on migration ever farther to the right in recent years so that it increasingly resembles the AfD’s, in what analysts say is a bid to win back voters from the anti-immigration party.
The AfD has surged in polls over the past two years to second place around 20%, roughly double its score in the 2021 federal election, as it dials into public worries about high levels of immigration and the sluggish economy, as well as frustration with feuding mainstream parties.
Merz vowed on Thursday to close Germany’s land borders to irregular migration if he becomes chancellor, a day after an Afghan asylum seeker was arrested for a deadly knife attack targeting children.
He also said he would be submitting motions to parliament on migration next week, including one to allow the federal police to request arrest warrants for people they apprehend who do not have the legal right to remain in Germany.
With Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens opposed to such moves, though, the conservatives would have to rely on the support of the AfD and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) to succeed.
“Next week, we will introduce motions in the German Bundestag that are exclusively in line with our convictions,” Merz said. “And we will introduce them regardless of who agrees with them.”
Merz specified that he remained convinced his party should not work with the AfD, saying that meant it would not form a coalition with it or negotiate motions with it.
But the CDU/CSU has in the past also sought to avoid putting forward motions at national level that it knows could only pass with the AfD.
Parliamentary insiders say the conservatives could seek an immediate parliamentary vote, which would require a two thirds approval they would unlikely be able to achieve, unless they seriously watered down Merz’s proposed measures.
DIVISIVE VOTE FOR CONSERVATIVES?
The conservatives have in the past only passed measures with the AfD at regional and local level.
In 2020, the failure of former CDU chancellor candidate Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to prevent CDU-AfD cooperation in Thuringia state was a key contribution to the pressure that forced her to abandon her ambitions for the chancellorship.
Philipp Koeker, political scientist at the University of Hanover, said Merz’s gambit was likely to backfire, irrespective of the outcome, “not only because he must now explain why he indirectly cooperated with the AfD … but also because the vote could reveal divisions within his own party”.
Leaders of the SPD and Greens on Friday accused him of playing with fire.
“Tearing down the firewall to the AfD and disregarding EU and constitutional law is probably the worst idea of the CDU/CSU and damages our democracy,” Greens co-leader Felix Banaszak told Welt am Sonntag.
The parliamentary leader of Scholz’s Social Democrats, Katja Mast, said Merz’s move would be “a breach of the dam”.
“This would give his cooperation with the AfD in the Bundestag a free ticket,” she said.
She added that the SPD and conservatives had agreed only to bring proposals into the lower house, the Bundestag, that could be approved by a majority from the mainstream parties.
The SPD parliamentary group assessed Merz’s main proposals on migration – such as automatic rejections of asylum seekers at the borders – as out of line with German and European law in a paper obtained by Reuters. It remains to be seen what the conservatives actually include in their parliamentary motion.
AfD leader Alice Weidel said on Thursday she was open to cooperating with the conservatives on migration.
FDP Deputy Parliamentary Leader Christoph Meyer said he was open to approving the conservatives’ measures.
(Reporting by Sarah Marsh, Andreas Rinke, Rachel More, Friederike Heine, Alexander Ratz, Holger Hansen and Riham Alkosuaa in Berlin; editing by Mark Heinrich)
