June 28, 2024 - 11:45am

As the German Greens drop to their lowest polling numbers since 2018, a new scandal is brewing at the country’s Foreign Ministry. According to reports confirmed by the Ministry, which is run by Green politician Annalena Baerbock, the German judiciary is now investigating civil servants for allegedly deliberately accepting forged and incomplete visa documents. Reportedly, German staff at consulates and embassies in countries including Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan were advised to accept fake passports, thereby enabling migrants to legally travel to Germany, despite violating existing rules that require proper documentation.

What was originally treated as a handful of cases could now actually be in the thousands, and the impression that a Green-run ministry has been prioritising ideology over proper legal procedure would further accelerate the party’s voter exodus. Migration is becoming an increasingly salient issue, particularly after a 20-year-old German was brutally beaten to death this week by, police claim, a Syrian migrant who entered the country in 2018.

Of course, the Greens’ support of mass immigration has never been a well-kept secret. Most memorably, the party’s Vice President of the Bundestag Katrin Göring-Eckardt responded to the 2015 migrant wave by saying: “We are being given people as a gift.” Contained within that line is the Greens’ basic attitude towards any kind of immigration, regardless of legality.

Since 2015, however, the German public has sobered up to the downsides of mass migration, and the impact on crime rates especially can no longer be denied. Berlin’s Chief of Police, Barbara Slowik, made this clear in a statement last week in which she acknowledged that the main perpetrators of the city’s spiralling knife crime are “young, male, and of non-German background”.

Although the investigation into forged visa documents is ongoing, the fact that the Foreign Ministry is yet to issue a denial — not to mention Baerbock’s own silence on the matter — is a strong indicator that the authorities are acting on more than a hunch. There have been suggestions in the past that the ministry was bending existing rules to fly in people from Afghanistan, and this is the most substantial charge yet. The accusation amounts to one of Germany’s most important federal ministries engaging in a form of human trafficking: enabling migrants to enter the country under false pretences or with forged documents is a crime prosecutable under existing law.

While this story is still developing, the question Germans are asking is no longer whether the forgeries took place but rather what the extent of the deception was and — crucially — who was involved. It is unlikely that Baerbock gave any such orders herself, but it’s entirely possible that her staff may have acted in accordance with the ideological preconceptions of their boss. The Greens are currently witnessing not just the discrediting of their liberal immigration policies, but also the rapid erosion of their voter base.