SEPTEMBER 20, 2023: Germany’s Greens and Liberals call for action on immigration as far-right strengthens

 

Germany’s Greens and Liberals call for action on immigration as far-right strengthens

 

Mainstream parties are increasingly spooked by the rise of the far-right AfD, which now leads the polls in four eastern states.

 

BY HANS VON DER BURCHARD

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023 4:00 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-struggles-to-contain-migration-influx/

 

BERLIN — You know fears over immigration and the rise of the far-right are boiling over in Germany when even the Greens are calling for a crackdown on illegal asylum seekers.

 

In a remarkable intervention on Monday, Green co-chair Ricarda Lang — whose party is usually known for advocating a moderate course on migration — criticized key officials from her two coalition partners for not doing enough to ensure that asylum seekers without a valid reason to stay, such as fleeing a warzone, are being sent back to their home countries.

 

There’s no doubt the political temperature is rising fast in Germany. A poll published Tuesday showed that the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party has become the strongest political force in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, making it the fourth eastern German state — after Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony — in which the far-right is leading in polls. This is particularly spooking established parties as the latter three states are heading to the polls in September next year, raising the possibility that the AfD might, for the first time, win power at state level.

 

The Greens’ Lang lashed out at Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who is from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Germany’s special envoy for immigration, Joachim Stamp from the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), saying that they must “finally make progress on repatriation agreements” with non-EU countries to facilitate the deportations. The government must act “to avoid more and more people arriving,” Lang said.

 

These unusual remarks from a senior Green politician come as the FDP of Finance Minister Christian Lindner on Monday adopted a position paper vowing to cut social payments for asylum seekers. The FDP also wants to convince its coalition partners to declare Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria as “safe” countries of origin, which would make it easier to send asylum seekers from those countries back home.

 

These actions highlight the extent to which Germany’s ruling coalition of the SPD, FDP and Greens is beginning to panic as migration numbers keep rising — in August alone, about 15,100 illegal border crossings were registered, marking a 40 percent increase compared to July — and an increasing number of Germans are turning toward the AfD.

 

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned Wednesday that Germany “is at breaking point,” as 162,000 people applied for asylum in the country within the first half of the year. That’s “more than a third of all applications within the EU,” Steinmeier added in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera.

 

While the AfD has not made a breakthrough at a state level, it took power at smaller district levels for the first time when it won a council election in Thuringia in June and notched up a mayoral election win in Saxony-Anhalt in July.

 

‘Hopelessly overwhelmed’

Although the AfD is building support on the back of many factors — inflation, high energy prices and the government’s poor handling of a controversial heating law — it is the growing influx of asylum seekers that is seen as its main catalyst.

 

“Such a party is getting stronger when problems are not being solved,” Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the main opposition party, said last week in reference to the immigration debate. He added cities and municipalities in Germany are “hopelessly overwhelmed” by the growing numbers of asylum seekers.

 

The AfD has also surged in national polls — from just 14 percent at the beginning of the year to 22 percent now, according to an average of national polls compiled by POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. That puts it as the country’s second-most popular party after the conservative alliance of the CDU with the Christian Social Union, which has 27 percent support. Scholz’s SPD is trailing on 17 percent.

 

The AfD is also on the rise in the western German states of Hesse and Bavaria, which will head to the polls in less than three weeks, on October 8.

 

In Bavaria, the AfD’s ascent is partly contained by the popular right-wing Free Voters party, which even managed to increase its standing in the influential southern state following a Nazi leaflet scandal involving its leading candidate Hubert Aiwanger.

 

In Hesse, however, the far-right party is making strong gains. Latest polls in the state, which is home to the banking hub of Frankfurt, indicate that the AfD is closing in on the SPD, which is particularly damning as the Social Democrats nominated Faeser, the interior minister, as their lead candidate in Hesse, hoping that her prominence would help the party to win the election against the incumbent CDU Premier Boris Rhein.

 

Instead, Faeser is getting hammered in the election campaign by the far-right, which accuses her of failing on the immigration front as interior minister — a job that Faeser has kept while running in Hesse, and which she wants to keep in case she loses the state election.

 

It isn’t helping Faeser that even the widely respected former German President Joachim Gauck criticized the government and called for more radical solutions.

 

“The measures taken so far have not been sufficient to remedy the loss of control that has obviously occurred,” the former president told public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday.

 

“That means we have to discover margins [for maneuver] that are initially unappealing to us because they sound inhumane,” added former Lutheran pastor Gauck, as he argued in favor of introducing “a limitation strategy” to curb the numbers of asylum seekers.