Firewalls and Border Walls

A rather different Mauerfall has thrown German politics into turmoil in the runup to the February 23 election. On Friday, January 31, the Bundestag narrowly rejected a tougher immigration law seeking to limit the influx of illegal immigrants, granting the federal police enhanced powers of deportation.

Immigration is the pivot of the election, with the German electorate willing to set things of a lot more import—such as the country’s economic breakdown—aside. But the political significance of Friday’s vote was something else altogether.

It concerns the Brandmauer, or firewall, that mainstream parties had erected against the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, or Alternative for Germany) to keep it out of any governing coalition in the near future.

And the man who stands accused of having taken the first unambiguous step towards pulling down the firewall is one many observers would have put their money on as Olaf Scholz’s successor as chancellor—Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as also of the parliamentary opposition.

Merz had vowed several times that he would never work with AfD and after Friday’s vote reaffirmed that he hadn’t worked with AfD. That failed to convince his critics since without AfD’s backing, the proposed legislation wouldn’t have come to the vote. It certainly stood no chance of passing without AfD’s support.

Which means, had the Bundestag cleared the opposition-sponsored bill, it would have become post-war Germany’s first law to see the light of day with the help of the far-right.

Today, it’s hard to recall the fact that AfD was founded, exactly 12 years ago, by economists, as a libertarian-cum-conservative eurosceptic protest platform. Instead, a lot of its front-ranking leaders now have close ties to neo-Nazis and are unabashed about wanting to rewrite history, wishing to forget Germany’s darkest epoch of 1933-45 and what it inflicted on the world. They are also Hitler apologists, even fans. And they have been growing more powerful by the day, having won the state elections in Thuringia in the former East Germany recently. They then won a powerful and vocal supporter in Elon Musk.

As per opinion polls, if Merz’s CDU is leading at around 30 per cent, AfD is second at 20 per cent. If Merz wants to govern with a centrist coalition, keeping AfD out, he cannot alienate either Scholz’s Social Democrats or the Greens. But tough anti-immigration laws are anathema to both and Friday’s defeated bill was already too much for them. As it happens, it’s AfD that has been claiming credit for the proposed law, arguing CDU merely piggybacked on its idea.

Given this state of affairs, Merz is finding it difficult to make people believe any more that he will not engage with AfD. He has already done so with the immigration bill, reasoning that who supports it was irrelevant as long as it passed. His urgency was doubtless the consequence of a number of recent incidents of violence, including terror and murder, by immigrants, the latest being a knife attack in a Bavarian town by an Aghan in which a boy and an adult man died.

Germany’s deeper crisis is, of course, an economy which is the only ‘analog’ major economy, having sat out on the digital revolution with what, in hindsight, turned out to be mis-prioritisation through the 1990s and noughts. Insisting on heavy industry and manufacturing, Germany had missed the bus long ago, as it did with its reliance on fossil fuels and Russia—the gas which got shut off—coupled with a shockingly mistimed decision to kill nuclear energy and go green. Ironically, Merz understands the economic malaise and what needs to be done but has had to switch his campaign plank from economy to immigration.

For its part, tech-savvy AfD loves Russian gas and wants it back. No chance of a structural economic overhaul there.

Austria recently tore down its own firewall against the far-right while the far-right has already been in government in the Netherlands. There’s no guarantee that AfD would remain on the margins for long, especially if it emerges as the main opposition on February 23.

Sooner or later, erecting the border wall, that is, closing the borders to stop unchecked immigration—Angela Merkel’s gift to Germany, Europe and AfD—is likely to become a reality. If Germany shuts its borders, so will others. The Schengen Area of open borders would then be history. And who knows, perhaps even the EU? Europe’s clock, in any case, seems to be turning back.

AfDBrandmauerChristian Democratic UnionelectionsFriedrich MerzGerman politicsillegal immigrantsimmigration lawOlaf ScholzWeb Exclusive