BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s main challenger in Germany’s upcoming election plans to put proposals for a tougher migration policy to parliament on Wednesday, a maneuver aimed at piling pressure on the governing parties that has brought accusations that he’s breaking commitments to shun the far right.
Opposition leader Friedrich Merz put migration in the focus of the campaign following a knife attack a week ago in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg by a rejected asylum-seeker, which left a man and a 2-year-old boy dead.
Germans will vote for a new parliament on Feb. 23 after Scholz’s three-party governing coalition collapsed. Polls show Merz’s mainstream center-right Union bloc in the lead with around 30% support, the far-right Alternative for Germany second with about 20%, and Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats and the environmentalist Greens further back.
Migration was already a significant election issue alongside Germany’s struggling economy. Merz’s aim appears to be to make the Union look decisive in seeking a tougher approach, which also has been a central call of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, while making Scholz and the Greens look weak. It’s uncertain whether the move will bolster his position.
Merz said last week that if he becomes chancellor, he would order the Interior Ministry immediately to control all Germany’s borders permanently and “turn back all attempts at illegal entry without exception,” including by asylum-seekers.
He said that people who are supposed to leave the country must no longer be let go if picked up by police. The conservative leader, who may well have to form a coalition with center-left parties to become chancellor, insisted that “compromises are no longer possible.”
He then announced that he would bring motions including those pledges to parliament this week, “independently of who approves them” — in other words, regardless of whether they need AfD’s support to gain a majority.
Wednesday’s expected votes are on nonbinding motions, which would send a political signal, but not change German law. On Friday, proposed legislation from the Union on less drastic changes to migration rules is set to go to a vote.
The Social Democrats and Greens, the parties in the remaining minority government, argue that Merz’s calls to turn back people at the border on a large scale are incompatible with German and European Union law. They plan to oppose his motions Wednesday, but they could pass with support from a combination of opposition parties, including AfD.
They accuse Merz of breaking longstanding promises not to work directly or indirectly with AfD, which has long urged other parties to abandon their “firewall” against it.
Merz insists that his position remains unchanged — his party won’t approve any AfD motion, go into government or work with it, or negotiate on any motions with it. And he argues that his aim is to gain support in the political center.
The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and in Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively — in the latter case, also a rejected asylum-seeker who was supposed to have been sent to Bulgaria, where he first entered the EU. In last month’s Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, the suspect is a Saudi doctor who had come to various regional authorities’ attention in the past.
Merz says Germany has had a “misguided asylum and immigration policy” for a decade — since Angela Merkel, a chancellor from his own party, allowed large numbers of migrants into the country.
The outgoing government says much changed already. It instituted temporary controls on all of Germany’s borders. It says it has tightened many laws, for instance to ease deportations, and points to a yet-to-be-implemented agreement on revamped EU migration rules.
Authorities say 229,751 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, a 30% decrease from the previous year. There were 18,384 deportations in the year’s first 11 months, compared with 16,430 in all of 2023.
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