(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Friedrich Merz brengt Duitse verkiezingen in stroomversnelling)
The temperature in the run-up to the German Bundestag elections on 23 February rose to boiling point after a 28-year-old Afghan attacked a toddlers’ class in Aschaffenburg (Bavaria) with a knife. He killed a 2-year-old boy, as well as a 41-year-old man who came to the child’s aid. Opposition leader Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU), will on Thursday launch a five-point plan in the Bundestag that tightens migration policy to an unprecedented degree. In doing so, Merz said, votes from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are also ‘welcome’. The game is on.
Merz presents his five-point plan as the basis for legislation on which the Bundestag must vote. Left-wing parties such as the social democratic SPD and the Greens recoil from Merz’s hard intervention. They accuse him of demolishing the cordon sanitaire, in German jargon ‘die Brandmauer’, against the AfD. Until now the votes of AfD members of the Bundestag were ignored by the coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, and also by the opposition group of the CDU/CSU. Merz is now seeking support ‘from whoever’.
Until recently the campaign for the Bundestag elections rippled along quietly. The theme was mainly energy and climate policy, on which Germany has cut its own fingers, above all through the abolition of nuclear energy. Aschaffenburg became the turning point, once again a ‘Zeitenwende’, and Merz, who had not really come into his own yet, occupied the epicentre of the political debate with his five-point plan. He argues for:
- Permanent controls of the German borders with the nine neighbouring countries;
- Immediate expulsion of foreigners who enter Germany without valid travel documents;
- Asylum seekers whose application is rejected may not move about freely but must go into detention;
- More support for the federal states in carrying out the obligation to expel;
- Strict rules for foreigners who have committed criminal offences, or who are ‘dangerous’ (unstable); they are placed in pre-departure detention, if necessary for an indefinite period.
Merz maintains that his five-point plan is in accordance with European law because the European system is currently ‘dysfunctional’. Just look at the Dublin Regulation (2013) that obliges asylum seekers to file their asylum request in the country of arrival. Most of them, however, want to go to Germany, and countries on the European external border let them through. Ergo: ‘Germany has the right of self-defence’. In an emergency situation it may apply national law ‘vorrangig anwenden’, because European law is not functioning.
Berlin woke up with a start at this reversal, and opponents of Merz feared he was imitating Trump. A columnist for Welt am Sonntag wrote about ‘wenn Merz den Trump macht’ and predicted: ‘Merz is going to lay claim to Mallorca and the North Sea will become the Gulf of Germany’. Donald Trump is not a popular figure in the land of his forefathers.
Ulf Poschardt, a prominent author at Die Welt, sees Merz’s sprint to the head of the peloton as a stroke of genius. ‘If the CDU takes the migration theme to itself before the elections, what is the AfD needed for?’ According to him many voters vote AfD out of disappointment with the established parties. ‘The offer now comes from “die bürgerliche Mitte”, which says: we have understood, we are putting an end to the idiotic migration policy’. Poschardt is uncommonly sharp, something he may have picked up from his Danish mother.
Merz has used at least one instrument from the Trump handbook: surprise. He comes up with a plan, outpaces the other parties, the media magnify it, and for voters Merz is suddenly at the centre, three weeks before the elections. Where before he was just one of the colourless gnomes, now he is setting the tone and thereby putting other parties on the spot.
In Berlin left-wing demonstrators took to the streets (according to the organisers there were 100,000 participants, according to the police 35,000) against the ‘Rechtsruck’ and against Merz. He was portrayed as the ‘stirrup of fascism’. It was a Berlin carnival procession that will sooner convince Germans ‘in den Ländern’ that Merz is on the right track.
SPD and Greens turned against the five-point plan on account of the ‘Brandmauer’, the total exclusion of the AfD in every way. In the Bundestag too, as with the agreement between the coalition and opposition parties never to let the votes of AfD parliamentarians be decisive. A proposal that wins the AfD’s approval must by definition be voted down. To that Merz is now making an exception. ‘I am sticking to that’, he said on Sunday to ZDF. Merz does, however, still refuse a coalition with the AfD. He wants to make that party ‘superfluous’ by taking up the grievances of the voters.
The AfD’s biggest supporter at the moment is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Whether it helps the AfD is doubtful. Anti-Americanism lives below the surface in West Germany; in East Germany it is virulent.
A vote on the five-point plan, which Merz wants to pilot through the Bundestag unchanged, puts all the other parties under pressure. Left-wing parties (SPD, Greens) form the front of refusal. The Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) is hesitating. The liberal FDP appears to be against. That is risky, because the FDP is hovering around the 5 percent electoral threshold in the polls. And then the AfD. If that party votes against, it is voting against its own policy programme. The parliamentarians of CDU/CSU, FDP, AfD and possibly BSW together add up to a majority. With his proposal Merz is driving all the other parties before him.
Merz’s initiative cannot be seen apart from his closest adviser and secretary-general of the CDU, Carsten Linnemann (47) from Paderborn, a municipality in North Rhine-Westphalia. Linnemann speaks briefly and clearly and thinks in strategic terms, whereas Merz, who comes from the Sauerland, still has a tendency now and then to misspeak. He often talks too fast. It is plausible that Linnemann is the architect of this operation, in which Merz was brought into line with the Bavarian CSU leader Markus Söder. Linnemann appeared in the media as the spokesman for the proposal; Merz initially made only the official speeches.
Linnemann, the son of a bookseller, is a rising star in the party and has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009, elected thanks to a Direktmandat. He is economically liberal and socially a values conservative. During the euro crisis he voted against all the financial packages to rescue Greece. He is fiscally conservative and wanted to abolish the ‘Solidarity Tax’ of 1991 (for aid to East Germany) in 2021, because this ‘temporary’ levy simply kept going. In 2017 he argued for an ‘Islam law’ to establish the rights and duties of Muslim organisations, such as a ban on the full financing of mosques from abroad.
Linnemann defends the five-point plan with unprecedented steadfastness. ‘We are not going to enter a coalition if this plan is rejected’. With that he keeps the CDU/CSU proposal, and the possible wriggling of the AfD, sharply on the voter’s radar.
The series of violence against citizens in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and Aschaffen. Merkel has made only one appearance during the election campaign: at the CDU’s New Year reception in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Hendrik Wüst is minister-president. Symbolic, because Wüst is a critic of the CDU’s ‘right-wing policy’, and a ‘Merkellian’. He will have to keep quiet for now, because it is the voter who decides on Merz and his plans. If Merz wins on 23 February, he will be the next chancellor. If the gamble fails, Wüst will undoubtedly be standing in the line of succession.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
