January 24, 2025 - 7:10am

An important rule for building walls is to know when you are walling someone out and when you are walling yourself in. Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s conservative CDU and likely next chancellor, is about to find this out the hard way. After two people — including a two-year-old child — were killed in a stabbing incident in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg and three more seriously injured, the German public is understandably angry.

Over the last 12 months there have been similar fatal stabbings in cities such as Solingen and Mannheim, while last month’s attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, which killed six people, remains fresh in the memory. In all these earlier cases the perpetrators had a migrant background, and now a failed Afghan asylum seeker has been arrested for the Aschaffenburg attack. He is reported to have deliberately targeted nursery children visiting a park.

A growing number of Germans now support a reduction in immigration and the deportation of foreign criminals from the country. Merz has promised to reduce illegal migration to zero on day one of his chancellorship, but why wait that long? A CDU-sponsored bill to reduce the number of illegal entries into Germany has been ready for a vote since November, but Merz refuses to bring it to the floor of the Bundestag out of fear that the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) could vote for it along with his own party. This would be tantamount to dissolving the “firewall”, the overused term by CDU/CSU politicians describing their policy of no cooperation with the AfD.

For a moment after the attack in Aschaffenburg, Merz appeared to change his tune, proposing a five-point plan and announcing that he would work with anyone who went along with it. According to this proposal, there would be a de facto entry ban for anyone without valid entry documents, as well as controls at all borders. The federal police would have the right to apply for arrest warrants for people apprehended at the border or airports, and the number of places in custody pending deportation would be increased. Meanwhile, offenders and dangerous individuals who are obliged to leave the country should be detained indefinitely. Merz also said that “deportations and returns must take place on a daily basis,” with the federal government making its own contribution.

Calling the CDU’s bluff, the AfD’s Alice Weidel yesterday sent an open letter addressing Merz in which she suggested that most of these points could already be made law with existing parliamentary majorities, and that it is unnecessary to wait for the results of the next month’s elections.

As expected, the CDU rejected the offer , calling it “poisoned”. Yet refusing this offer may prove more poisonous than accepting it. The “firewall” increasingly resembles an obsession for Merz, who now comes across as a politician who would rather risk German lives than vote for a single bill alongside a particular rival party. What he considers a strategy could easily be interpreted as aloof arrogance, indicative of a conservative party which believes it is entitled to rule.

Many Germans are fully aware that the country’s ongoing problems with migration have come as a direct consequence of Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-borders policy. The former CDU leader caused the problems, and the current leader refuses to solve them unless he is made chancellor. This attempt to essentially blackmail the more than 20% of the electorate which supports the AfD into voting for the CDU could backfire. Merz may think he is walling the AfD out, but it is equally likely that he is walling himself in, and that he and his party will realise this once election results come in on 23 February.


Ralph Schoellhammer is assistant professor of International Relations at Webster University, Vienna.

Raphfel