Cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland begins to crack, as desperate CDU say they are open to AfD support in passing proposals to stem mass migration
Germany's dominant centre-right party has breached the greatest tabu in German politics. Dare we even hope this is real?
This is a potentially huge story. It could be the beginning of a sea-change in German politics, that is how big it is. At the same time, it could be also be nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.
For those who don’t want to read my ramblings (this will be a longer post), I offer this TL;DR: The cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland is showing signs of serious rupture. The centre-right CDU are suddenly – without warning – reconsidering their long-standing tabu against cooperating with the “extreme right” opposition. It is this singular tabu that has kept the traditional German party system frozen in amber despite a massive rightward political shift across the West. Should the cordon sanitaire crack even a little, its days are numbered. The simple arithmetic of parliamentary majorities would sooner or later make the most noxious political fixtures of current-year Germany, like the Green Party, broadly irrelevant at the federal level. The German left would be deprived at once of almost all their power.
I am sceptical that this can really be happening. Yesterday, I would’ve expected a change like this in 2029 at the earliest. Many are saying (justifiably) that the CDU should not be trusted, that they will say anything to get elected and that nothing will come of their promises. All that may well be true. Words, however, matter all by themselves: In 2019, tacit cooperation in Thüringen between the CDU and the AfD unleashed an entire national scandal; the press hyperventilated for weeks. Now the federal leadership of the CDU is openly pledging to pass legislation with AfD votes in the Bundestag, and major CDU-adjacent journalists are writing long opinion pieces about why this is just the right thing to do.
This development arises directly from the pressure of mass migration, and specifically from the four recent deadly migrant attacks I have covered in the past year:
On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.
Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.
These attacks have become a symbol for the entire mess migrationism has wrought. The dead and the wounded count for a lot in themselves, but they have also come to represent the dwindling social cohesion, the stretched financial resources and the erosion of domestic security that accepting entire foreign populations into one’s nation entails. All of it is for nothing, nobody has any solutions and there is no end in sight.
In liberal democracies, policies have to be normie-friendly, and mass migrationism was normie-friendly only until enough migrants crossed our borders to make their presence felt socially and culturally. Mass migration isn’t normie-friendly anymore. It’s become a foul political poison.
Mass migration is also a very hard nut to crack. We have outsourced a great part of our border security and migration policy to highly bureaucratised international authorities and a tangle of high-minded humanitarian legislation that leaves us little room to manouevre. Solving mass migration will require a great deal of political resolve and a willingness to pick fights with globaloid EU pencil-pushers. All of this meant that, until Mannheim, Alternative für Deutschland had a near-monopoly on hardline anti-migration politics. The unrelenting series of attacks by people who have no business being in Germany, together with the collapse of the government and the impending early elections in February, have left the centre-right CDU desperate to stake their own claim to this increasingly central political space. That, and perhaps a healthy dash of the Trump Effect, are the forces currently pushing the traditional party system of the Federal Republic to the brink.
The Aschaffenburg stabbings may be the event that finally pushes that system beyond the brink. You’ll remember that Germany presently has a feckless Green-Social Democrat minority government. The centre-right Union parties, with the market-liberal FDP, the AfD and the smattering of (right-leaning) unaffiliated Bundestag representatives together command a slim majority in the opposition. Since November, in other words, there has existed the theoretical possibility to do something – anything – about mass migration, and to do it over the heads of the oblivious Greens and the SPD. However ineffectual, however cosmetic, however experimental, however likely to run afoul of the European Court of Justice – there is still, just sitting on the fucking shelf, a theoretical majority that could do something.
The cordon sanitaire, however, means nobody can use AfD votes for anything. It splits the right and gives the minority open-borders parties all the say. In November, CDU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz was still reaffirming the precious cordon sanitaire against the AfD. He pledged to coordinate with the other approved, traditional parties to ensure that no measures passed with any votes from the dreaded Hitler Nazi Populist Xenophobes. Merz also wasted a lot of breath denouncing the AfD as a fascist party and refusing ever to cooperate with them – all as the CDU stagnated in the polls at a dismal 30%.
But, as I said: Aschaffenburg. Enamullah Omarzai’s stabbing spree increased Merz’s desperation. Hours after the news broke, he outlined a hard five-point plan to stem migration. On his first day in office, he promised to use his authority as chancellor to close the German borders and “reject all attempts at illegal entry without exception.” He pledged to pass a law that would allow federal police to obtain arrest warrants, without the authority of prosecutors, for illegal migrants they happen to detain. He called for all migrants who have lost the right to stay in Germany to be held in custody pending deportation, he promised to deputise the federal police to assist states with deportations, and finally he said he would create a legal basis for indefinitely holding criminal offenders who have lost their right to stay in Germany. It was a de facto remigration scheme, promising to stop all new arrivals and begin a programme of “daily deportations.”
Merz’s plan pushes the boundaries of the legally possible and beyond; it is basically a rehash of demands that the AfD have been making for a long time now. The Social Democrats, who stand a good chance of being coalition partners to the CDU in a future government, swiftly rejected the proposal. But on the right, there arose even sounder objections: The theoretical Bundestag majority to do something about mass migration already exists. Why wait until the new government? How many lives is the cordon sanitaire worth? That is not my argument, please understand, I reject histrionic appeals like this. I am only saying that these are the arguments people were making. To twist the knife in the wound (sit venia verbo), AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel wrote an open letter to Merz, pointing out that “the majorities … are there” to “put into practice what citizens rightly expect from their politicians.” It was an offer of cooperation from the AfD to do something about migration when the Bundestag sits again next week.
The CDU swiftly rejected the “poisoned proposal,” but something was happening just out of sight within party ranks. Merz suddenly asserted that the CDU would only accept coalition partners in a future government who supported his five-point migration reform plan. Carsten Linnemann, General Secretary of the CDU, then gave an interview to Welt yesterday in which he doubled down on this ultimatum. It was strange to watch a CDU politician make so much sense. He said over and over that either potential coalition partners can bend the knee to the CDU anti-migration agenda, or they can let the migrants continue to pour in and none of the traditional parties will be in power for much longer.
Hours after Linnemann’s interview, late last night, CDU leadership held a meeting. At this meeting, Merz is reported to have said “I’m going all in” and “I don’t care who else is involved. I’m not going to let myself be guided by tactical considerations any longer.” The words appear to be a reference to his pre-Aschaffenburg adherence to the cordon sanitaire and his refusal to pass any legislation with votes from the AfD.
After that meeting, the following memo went out to all CDU Bundestag representatives:
We had another presidium meeting last night.
Note the following important information:
Friedrich Merz will submit some very clear proposals on migration and refugee policy to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Should these proposals come to a vote (procedurally, it is somewhat complicated to have these proposals voted on immediately), we will go into that vote without regard to who is supporting these proposals. This applies even if only the AfD supports our proposals. (In this case, two things: 1. We want to submit all the necessary motions ourselves and seek support for them, and will therefore not enter into the debate about supporting motions from other parliamentary groups. 2. The CDU and AfD do not have a majority in the Bundestag).
Regarding the points presented yesterday: the party leader’s message is clear. No coalition with anyone without the implementation of these points.
That last sentence is a reference to Merz’s five-point plan to stop mass migration.
Merz confirmed the shift just hours ago in a statement to journalists, promising to “bring motions to the floor of the Bundestag next week” and seek a vote “regardless of who agrees,” declaring that “Now is the end of any tactical games.” The CDU chancellor candidate who just two weeks ago declared that he would “make [his] fate as CDU party leader dependent on the” cordon sanitaire, has now written off the whole thing as “tactical games.” That is how much pressure the CDU is under, and it is also how stupid the cordon sanitaire always was.
Now it is possible that Merz’s “proposals on migration and refugee policy” never come to a vote for procedural reasons, or because the CDU works behind the scenes to scuttle their own initiative. Even in that case, however, Merz has already done a great deal to weaken the AfD tabu. There is some chance, however – and perhaps not a small one – that the CDU pass major federal legislation with AfD votes. If they do that, then the tabu is not weakened, it is broken. If the CDU can address migration lunacy with AfD support, there is no reason they should not address any number of other lunacies with AfD support, and if they start to do that, German politics will finally and quite suddenly become unstuck in a very serious way.
Nothing ever happens, except for sometimes when it does.
I’ll come back and read the whole thing later.
Just wanted to say that Trump’s election victory might just actually manage to begin to save Germany too.
Wouldn’t Europeans watching ICE begin detaining illegal immigrants in Boston etc. not think to themselves “Well, why couldn’t we do that too?”, and the German government will be only too aware of this. That Fox News clip posted in yesterday’s comments was very revealing.