A Decisive Month for Germany
In trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, Germany’s liberal politicians are pushing their country right back toward them.
One of the most pointless cliches holds that “those who do not learn from history are fated to repeat it.” It sounds profound, for about half a minute, until you think about it. Learn from history, fine. But learn what? Should you have done the opposite of whatever it was that you did? Or have done the same thing, but sooner? Is your current situation even analogous to the alleged precedent? If you think that sounds academic, look to Germany. At this moment, the specter of history and the political shenanigans around its supposed lessons are setting that country on the road to ruin.
For the left and center-left, especially the Green Party and the social-democrat SPD, German history holds just one crystal clear and overriding lesson: a return to fascism is an ever-present danger that must be continuously warded off. And the way to do that is by maintaining an absolute “firewall” against the right.
The center-right Christian Democrat CDU/CSU sees a different lesson. They warn that the populace’s fears and concerns must be addressed earnestly and effectively because dismissing them will lead to anger and radicalization.
Immigration has become a major concern to the voters. In fact, in a recent representative poll, “immigrants and refugees” was the top worry named by Germans, ahead of everything else including the economy, climate change, and terrorism. 68 percent of Germans want fewer immigrants and refugees to join those already there. A paltry 10 percent believe their government has the problem in hand.
And yet, last Friday, the German parliament rejected a bill sponsored by the CDU/CSU aimed at improving the management of the country’s out-of-control illegal immigration. The SPD and the Greens, joined by some within the CDU/CSU, managed to defeat it narrowly. Not because they disagreed with its provisions, but because the right-wing party they despise, the AfD, was going to support it. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in speeches that conjured the horrors of Auschwitz and the Nazi era, asserted that one must never find oneself on the same side with the AfD, and therefore one could not vote “with” them. Ever. Period.
It’s undeniable that Germany’s asylum, refugee, and immigration policy is a full-on mess. It is an economic burden, a clear and present danger to public safety, and has already had a massively destructive impact on the quality of daily life and the integrity of cultural values.
Only 22 percent of those applying for asylum are ultimately found to be qualified, but the process is lengthy, cumbersome, and expensive. In 2023, 29.7 billion euros from the government’s coffers were spent on migrants. Having an asylum claim rejected means little; most are allowed to stay under the so-called “toleration” principle and a slew of other loopholes. This would be less disturbing if they tried to fit in. Instead, there is widespread resistance to learning German, and there are many demands that Germans should change their traditions, habits, and values to align with those of the newcomers. And some of those habits and values are problematic in the extreme. Crime statistics show that migrants account for a mind-blowing 41 percent of registered crimes.
The 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve celebration in Cologne has been termed the “event that changed Germany.” The long-standing tradition was for a cheerful crowd to gather in front of the train station, facing the iconic cathedral, to await the stroke of midnight. In 2015, in a coordinated action, 1,000 migrant men later identified as mainly Arab, descended on the train station and began to attack and rob the revelers. At knifepoint, they stole cell phones and wallets, but women were their main target. 661 women later filed police reports of sexual assaults including rapes. The police were caught unprepared; it was customary to have only a small police presence at such events, to not detract from the festive atmosphere and because more were not required. From 2016 onward, this and similar events had to be heavily and visibly guarded; a social worker who ran a refugee shelter termed it a “paradigm change” and described it as the abrupt end to Germany’s flirtation with the charms of diversity. And indeed, this also marked the rise of the AfD.
Did the bill before Parliament contain racist content or propose anti-foreigner measures? No, it consisted of moderate administrative reforms to allow more efficient management of the refugee and immigration process. The CDU/CSU is conservative, and so was their bill. However, the far-right party AfD was going to vote for it. And according to the liberals, no matter what, one must never be on the same side as the AfD; this was a “firewall” that must never be broken.
How did Germany get to this point? It started in 2015 when, abruptly and en masse, a stream of refugees poured across Germany’s borders. That year, 1.1 million of them would file asylum applications. An unknown number just dissipated into the immigrant population or moved on to other European countries. The institutions were unprepared and overwhelmed. Then-Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière described it as a situation that “must never be repeated” and promised control and streamlining. That never happened; things would get far worse. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel assumed that the majority of these persons were fleeing the conflict in Syria. She further assumed that they were largely middle-class professionals in family units and would be a demographic and economic asset to Germany. As soon transpired, only 20 percent of asylum seekers were actually Syrian. The rest came from Serbia, Albania, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Somalia. Most were male. Many were illiterate or nearly so.
Still, Merkel famously said “Wir schaffen das”—we can handle this. Her country had the reputation of being xenophobic, and here was an opportunity to show the world a beautiful new, diversity-friendly, humane, generous, open-armed, and open-hearted Germany. The public at that point was largely on board. They went to train stations to welcome the newcomers with applause, clothing donations, and bags of homemade sandwiches. The authorities scrambled to provide them with free everything: housing, food, medical care, and regular spending money.
But the bloom soon came off the rose of Germany’s lovely multicultural fantasy as the mounting expenses, the soaring crime rate, shocking incidents of violence, and the manifest unwillingness of the newcomers to adapt and integrate gave way to second thoughts. The main problem was violent crime. The German government thought to keep the wobbling flame of multicultural tolerance alight by suppressing the data and withholding mention of the ethnicities and legal status of the perpetrators from the media, but that wasn’t possible for long. There were horrible murders, and rape-murders, of women. Helpers in refugee shelters were killed—a Red Cross worker, and a woman who had volunteered to teach a language class. Many of these murders were committed by individuals who were supposed to have been deported long before but were still in the country and still drawing benefits. The crimes were random and terrifying.
There was the bloody attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market. Six people including a child were killed and many more were severely injured; as an additional casualty, the relaxed and serene magic of Germany’s Christmas markets was now gone for good. Already there had been barricades and an elevated police presence; it hadn’t stopped a determined assassin. The perpetrator, from Saudi Arabia, had announced his intention to carry out a terrorist attack well in advance. He had on record a staggering 1,000 encounters with the police. And the Saudi government had repeatedly reached out to the German government to warn it about this individual. With the proper mechanisms in place, this tragedy could have been prevented and future ones forestalled, which had been the point of the failed bill.
Hardly had the public recovered from the shock of Magdeburg, when it was followed by Aschaffenburg. There, a twenty-eight-year-old Afghan, in the country illegally, attacked a preschool group playing in a park, knifing a two-year-old boy to death and badly injuring a little girl before advancing towards the remaining children. A passerby, himself a father of small children, threw himself between the assailant and the toddlers and was also killed. The subsequent inquiry revealed that the perpetrator had committed three previous violent assaults, but hearts-and-flowers multicultural Germany had not jailed him, instead arranging for him to be treated for “depression.” He had long since been denied asylum and was under a deportation order, but the order had not been executed. That was one of the issues addressed in the bill: to better empower the police to carry out existing deportation orders.
The left and the mainstream parties are in full-bore panic. Perhaps they are truly in the grip of their nightmare scenario of a return to fascism; perhaps they are just distraught over the drastic diminishment of their influence, status, and power; perhaps it’s a combination. As a measure of their desperation, they are now weighing the option of having the AfD banned. In Germany, this requires a judgment of the Constitutional Court, an equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court. Two formal requests for the court to consider a ban have been drafted, by a group that includes the far left, the SPD, and some in the CDU. The bar is high, the odds are low, and the consequences of failure are significant, but more importantly: what happened to learning from history? This is drawn exactly from the playbook of the Weimar Republic. And where did that land the Germans? In that case, in 1922/1923, they succeeded in having the NSDAP—Hitler’s party—banned. They even succeeded in having him jailed. Did that stop him?
In the United States, treating citizens you disagree with as “deplorables” and “garbage” did not pan out well at the ballot box. In Germany, condemning reasonable efforts to get national control over immigration as fascist will swell the ranks of the AfD. Attempting to ban it makes you look terrified. Even if you succeed in banning the party, which German political analysts consider unlikely, how will that play with the public? How will it affect the already fractured and fractious electorate? In the state of Thuringia in September, the AfD received a third of the votes. What is the SPD’s game plan? Ban the party they supported, demonize them, and then what?
Some within the mainstream CDU/CSU understand this. Boris Rhein, leader of the German state of Hesse, argued that “we need a fundamental policy shift on migration. And if we don’t solve that problem in a centrist way, then others will solve it for us, and not in a way that we will like.” Exactly.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz called on his party members to vote for the immigration bill—their own bill!—and was denounced as a Nazi sympathizer by Social Democrats including Scholz. Merkel, who you would think had done more than enough damage during her time in office, and who can fairly be considered the mother of the current migrant mess, could not resist weighing in to warn against voting for the bill. Because it was bad? Because it contained unfair or undemocratic measures? No. Only and purely because “we can’t be part of something that passes with the votes of the AfD.”
In parliament on Friday, had the CDU/CSU held the line, the bill would have passed, and middle-of-the-road Germans concerned about migration could comfortably have remained middle of the road. And herein may lie the far less noble motivation of the SPD. Scholz, a shrewd political operator, cannot be pleased that his party has been overtaken, by leaps and bounds, by the CDU/CSU. Delivering a successful bill on a topic of such high concern to the voters would have helped their popularity even more. When the SPD beseeched the CDU/CSU to “turn back from the gates of hell” by not voting for their own bill, was there perhaps some coolly pragmatic calculus in play beneath the dramatic language?
Germany’s national election will be held on February 23, and polls give the CDU/CSU a strong, nearly unbeatable lead. That would make Merz the new chancellor, but he will need to form a coalition. Polls show that the public prefers a “grand coalition” between the two largest establishment parties, i.e., with the SPD, but very narrowly. 32% favor the SPD, but a stunning 26% want a coalition with the AfD. Perhaps that is the “gate of hell” giving nightmares to the SPD—that they are a mere 6 percentage points away from sliding into irrelevance. Can anyone think that banning the AfD will make all those sentiments go away? The sensible course, if you are worried about them, is to peel away their supporters by offering a moderate, but real, solution. An alternative, you could even say, to the alternative.
About the author: Cheryl Benard
Dr. Cheryl Benard was program director in the RAND National Security Research Division. She is the author of Veiled Courage, Inside the Afghan Women’s Resistance; Afghanistan: State and Society; Democracy and Islam in the Constitution of Afghanistan; and Securing Health, Lessons from Nation-building Missions. Currently, she is the Director of ARCH International, an organization that protects cultural heritage sites in crisis zones.
Image: Maheshkumar Painam via Unsplash