CORDON SANITAIRE ON LIFE SUPPORT: Merz bows to pressure, pledges to bring anti-migration legislation to the Bundestag on Friday and hopes to pass it with AfD support

Friedrich Merz at a press conference earlier today.

Despite everything, the cordon sanitaire against the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party known as Alternative für Deutschland really appears to be crumbling. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has set in motion a chain of events he can no longer control. This coming Friday, there is every chance that anti-migration legislation will pass the Bundestag and become law with the help of AfD votes – an eventuality that was unimaginable even seven days ago.

As I reported in my prior post, Merz said last week that he was open to passing anti-migration bills with AfD support. His statement was remarkable, because it violated the most important tabu in German politics, namely that against achieving any outcomes with votes from the AfD. This tabu excludes the political voice of opposition voters and insulates the traditional party system from political change.

Almost from the beginning, there was messaging confusion from within the CDU about Merz’s statement. The reversals, re-reversals, doublings down, and contradictions that have flowed from Merz and his party over the weekend are highly significant. They suggest a panicked CDU leadership that is in disarray, eager to stem the tide of defections to the AfD and desperate to weaken the negotiating positions of the leftist SPD and Green parties. The cordon sanitaire is a wedge driven straight through the right that allows an ever more unpopular left to punch far above their weight and maintain their vice-grip on German migration policy. It was intended to wall out the AfD, but as the AfD has grown stronger, it has only walled in the CDU. Remarkably, the CDU seem to have finally figured this out.

Merz responded to the growing cries of outrage from the left at first predictably – by backtracking. He insisted he wanted not the AfD but the “political middle” to support his anti-migration legislation. In a strange statement on Saturday, he announced that “We have sent the SPD, the Greens and the FDP all the texts that we want to pass next week” so that “We can … agree on how we will vote next week.” He added bizarrely that “The AfD is not receiving these texts.” These “texts” leaked almost immediately; they turned out to be resolutions calling on the Green and SPD government to tighten border security and increase deportations.

They contained passages like this one:

Combating illegal migration … deprives populists of their political rationale. The AfD exploits the problems, concerns and fears that have arisen as a result of mass illegal migration to stir up xenophobia and spread conspiracy theories. It wants Germany to leave the EU and the Euro and instead turn to Putin’s Eurasian economic union. All of this endangers Germany’s stability, security and prosperity. That is why this party is not a partner, but our political opponent.

Obviously, the AfD would have problems voting for such resolutions (see UPDATE at the end of this post), and they are meaningless anyway, as they are not legally binding and the SPD-Green minority government would simply ignore them and continue to welcome masses of migrants into Germany as they always have. It was all a fake, it was all a bluff, everyone said – just another metric tonne of bullshit from the CDU.

After the outcry, Merz clarified that the draft resolutions were only two of three items that he intends also to bring to the Bundestag. The third item, he said, would be a piece of actual legislation. So Merz reversed himself again, and we found ourselves back to where we were on Friday. The man had no choice. He could live in a world where he sees no benefits from questioning the cordon sanitaire and gets hammered by the left and the media anyway, or he could live in a world where he at least gets something in return for the all the attacks he has invited.

Between late Sunday and this morning, it became apparent that Merz and everybody else in Berlin had grasped the logic of their situation:

The CDU/CSU is now suddenly making statements that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago: “What is right in this matter does not become wrong just because the wrong people agree with it,” Friedrich Merz said on Monday, reiterating his intention to raise the issue of migration in the Bundestag, regardless of the possible majority supporters. “I stand by my clear position.”

“The AfD is not the problem – the problem is that a two-year-old child was murdered while sitting in a handcart, that a helper stood by and paid with his life, that emergency services are now being attacked elsewhere,” CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann fumed on Sunday. Such a sentence may seem unproblematic and logical to the average citizen, but in political Berlin it is disreputable at the very least.

Meanwhile, FDP leader Christian Lindner has already made it clear that he will support the CDU/CSU motions to tighten migration policy in the Bundestag, even if their adoption would only be secured by the approval of the AfD. On Deutschlandfunk, Lindner emphasised that he “doesn’t care if the AfD votes in favour.” What matters, he said, was that parliament send a clear signal.

And now we get to the heart of it: What legislation will Merz and his CDU bring to the Bundestag? This matters enormously: Merz probably has a simple majority for an anti-migration bill, but he cannot bring new legislation to the floor without a two-thirds supermajority to expedite a vote. If Merz and the CDU were just bluffing, they would therefore introduce a new bill and let it get lost in procedure. If they were serious, they would introduce one of the earlier anti-migration bills they had proposed and then tabled last year. The AfD and Alice Weidel urged them to do the latter and promised their support. They even pledged to reintroduce one of these old proposals themselves. Specifically, they said they would bring the ‘Influx Limitation Act’ from last September to a vote, and hope for CDU support.

An hour ago, Merz finally announced his intentions, and I can hardly believe it. He has bowed to AfD pressure – the Influx Limitation Act it shall be:

According to NIUS information, the big showdown in the Bundestag on migration policy will take place on Friday … The Union wants to introduce their already-complete “Influx Limitation Act” [“Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz”] and put it to a vote. The draft was debated … in a plenary session on 12 September. On 6 November 2024, the draft was rejected in the interior committee, but already received the votes of the CDU, AfD and BSW. With the votes of the FDP … the law could find a majority on Friday – and end the cordon sanitaire.

What exactly the “Influx Limitation Act” contains almost doesn’t matter; it pales in significance to the crumbling cordon sanitaire, and to the obvious fact that the AfD are literally driving the Union parties before them – as a friend says, “chasing the CDU with their own bills.” The TL;DR, however, is that it re-establishes limiting migration as an overarching purpose of our residence laws, it ends family protection for those migrants who enjoy “subsidiary protection,” and increases the powers of the federal police to detain and deport illegal migrants. It is not a silver bullet, but it may help a little around the edges. Merz has raised the cordon sanitaire – potentially changing German politics forever – and all of it just for this.

It’s worth noting that Merz has public sentiment firmly behind him, although you wouldn’t know it from the pearl-clutching German press. His hardline five-point plan to stop illegal migration and deport illegal migrants enjoys the support of 66% of Germans, including a majority of SPD voters and 30% of Greens.

UPDATE: The AfD have clarified that they will support even the non-binding resolutions that trash them, if the CDU brings them into the Bundestag. “We will vote for Germany,” Bernd Baumann told the press just hours ago.