Merz promised an end to mass migration, but so far he has delivered primarily messaging chaos. Could this be some kind of insane strategy?

Federal police conducting random checks at the border to Germany.

The central question in German politics right now, is whether our new government has any interest in stopping mass migration (as they claim), or whether they are merely trying to appear as if they are doing something to stop mass migration (as the track record of the Union parties would suggest). Wildly contradictory messaging coming from Merz’s cabinet has made this question remarkably hard to answer.

Before you say “well, that’s obviously because they are lying about their efforts to stop mass migration,” I want to insist that messaging chaos is not actually the hallmark of deception. The last government flatly lied about their plans to increase border security and deportations, and they managed to remain on-message quite easily. Messaging chaos indicates something more than simple deception.

I also want to point out that there is nothing implausible about the Union parties actually trying to restrict migration. If the Christian Democrats want to hurt Alternative für Deutschland badly, and hurt them for good, they’ll have to take the migration issue away from them. Many within the party are desperate to do this.

On Wednesday, I wrote that our new Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) had formally abolished asylum as a path into Germany and empowered the Federal Police to begin pushing back migrants at the borders. That was, in itself, a big deal, and not the kind of thing you would do if you were merely interested in leading gullible Union voters down the garden path. The Interior Ministry also announced that they were increasing police presence at the borders and journalists confirmed this to be the case.

Within hours, however, Merz and Dobrindt began relativising these developments. Merz appeared at a press conference alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and when the latter said his country would not accept German pushbacks, Merz began uttering various phrases that did not mean anything concrete but that also did not sound very good. He said, for example, that border controls “should be conducted in a way that our neighbours find acceptable” and he also said that mass migration is a problem to be “solved collectively” by EU member states. Dobrindt then held a press conference in Berlin where he spoke in much the same way. Afterwards, anonymous reports emerged of a phone call Merz allegedly held with Tusk last Sunday. According to these reports, Merz had privately promised the Polish government that nothing would change on the border.

This whole strange act repeated itself on Thursday evening, when Welt reported that the Merz had declared a “national emergency” to justify border pushbacks. Specifically, Welt said Germany would invoke Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which says that EU laws “shall not affect the exercise of the responsibilities incumbent upon Member States with regard to the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security.”

Multiple CDU and CSU politicians took to X in jubilation, but within hours the government denied the story and all those politicians deleted their tweets. Then, Dobrindt appeared on national television and confirmed that his Ministry was in fact invoking Article 72 to justify pushbacks despite the official denials. Later, the government clarified that they just didn’t like the term “national emergency,” even though declaring a “national emergency” is exactly how Merz had previously characterised invoking Article 72.¹

Because that did not seem to be enough backpedalling, Merz then went to Brussels, where he met with António Costa, who is President of the European Council. At a press conference afterwards, he said this:

No one in the federal government, including myself, has declared an emergency. We are now conducting more intensive checks at the borders. We are conducting checks similar to those carried out during the European Football Championship last year. We will continue to turn people away. But all of this is in accordance with European law. Our European neighbors have been fully informed of this. Germany is not acting alone here. We are coordinating our actions with our European neighbors.

I guess it’s so over, and we’re not so back after all – right?

Well, not so fast. Today, BILD did the logical thing. They went to the Federal Police and asked them what orders their officers at the border had received. According to Andreas Roßkopf, who chairs the Federal Police Union, “The Federal Minister of the Interior has issued binding instructions” requiring border officers to “turn away every asylum seeker and person seeking protection – excepting pregnant women, the sick and unaccompanied minors.” His colleague, Heiko Teggatz, confirmed this information, emphasising that pushbacks are “mandatorily prescribed.”

BILD also consulted “asylum experts,” who estimate that the new policies have reduced border crossings substantially, and estimate that as few as 10 refugees per day are presently entering the Federal Republic as of Wednesday. I rather doubt it can be that drastic, but one can hope.

We need to be cautious here, and we won’t know anything for sure until statistical evidence emerges. What we have so far, however, suggests that the Merz government are indeed being dishonest – but for once, to everybody but ordinary Germans.

Migration reform is a huge, thorny problem; it entails violating EU law, angering neighbours and inflaming the Social Democrats, who are also in government. Merz and Dobrindt have therefore decided to dance around these problems by publicly assuring the European Union and Poland and the SPD that nothing is happening, even as the Interior Ministry orders the Federal Police to enact across-the-board pushbacks. Because they cannot clearly communicate their policies to voters, we get contradictory messaging chaos.

1. That an EU member state might try to use Article 72 to suspend asylum, is a tactic colloquially referred to as “declaring a national emergency,” but there is nothing in the statute itself that requires states to declare anything. The whole debate is therefore abundantly retarded and semantic. The possibility of invoking Article 72 has also already been tested in court; the ECJ has generally rejected this approach. So.