Germany’s firewall against the far right ended not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a vote. Friedrich Merz, likely to be Germany’s next Chancellor, told the parliament that it was “necessary” to build a majority with the AfD’s votes to save German lives. His party and the soon-to-be-extinct FDP obliged, combining with their far right colleagues to pass a non-binding resolution calling for stricter rules on asylum and migration.
Gyde Jensen, once Germany’s youngest female Parliamentarian whose Twitter profile declares “there are no human rights light,” said she voted for a “new realpolitik in migration.” Realism is often cited as a reason to support harsh immigration measures, especially when any alternative is caricatured as ‘open borders.’
At its core, the CDU’s proposal effectively promises zero irregular arrivals through Germany’s land borders. I was once corrected for saying that zero arrivals is as utopian as open borders; after all, at least there is an example of the latter in modern times. No government has ever successfully imposed a “de facto entry ban for persons without valid entry documents.” Even if this resolution were to become binding law, this CDU/CSU’s promise would be quickly broken.
The CDU made another, equally unrealistic, promise to end secondary movements. There is nothing new about this debate: (West) Germany was complaining already in 1989 about rules that prevented the return of asylum seekers to places like Greece. In 1990, the member states of the European Communities agreed a set of rules on which state is responsible for which asylum application in the Dublin Convention, the core ideas of which still guide Europe’s asylum architecture.
A lot has changed since then - Germany reunified, the Soviet Union collapsed, the European Union was founded three years later, the Schengen Area was established in 1995 to abolish internal borders and forced migration from former Yugoslavia led to the adoption of the Temporary Protection Directive in 1999. Even though we now live in the world’s largest free movement area, the EU’s asylum system remains fragmented along national lines.
The increased border security that the CDU wants is best delivered not by ‘permanent border controls’ but by allowing refugees freer movement within the Schengen Area. Building an asylum system fit for the European Union requires replacing national dysfunctional systems with a common protection space, where asylum seekers apply for an EU-wide status. This would align the interests of Germany with frontline countries, such as Greece, and pool resources for the reception of asylum seekers, the adjudication of their claims and the returns of those found ineligible. It could even reduce the number of people who come to Germany, as refugees could consider living elsewhere in the EU without forever losing the opportunities that the continent’s largest economy could offer them.
Of course, the electorate which these politicians seek to agitate is not concerned about to-be migrants to Germany, but about migrants who are currently here. As I’ve written before, bullies don’t check someone’s papers before they tell them to go back where they came from. A majority in the German parliament did not just vote for a stricter asylum policy. It promised voters a less diverse Germany, by means of a more fractured Europe. It sounds to me like the AfD already won.