The man who has been heavily favored to become Germany’s next chancellor took an extraordinary gamble this week, both for his political future and his country’s longstanding firewall against political extremism.
It did not go as he hoped.
In an effort to portray himself and his party as tough on immigration, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the poll-leading Christian Democrats, pushed a series of measures tightening borders and accelerating deportations through Parliament this week. He did so with help from the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD — parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence agencies.
On Friday, the gambit ended in a crushing legislative defeat for Mr. Merz, dissent in his own party and jubilant claims of new legitimacy from the AfD, a chain reaction that could rattle Mr. Merz’s comfortable seat at the top of the polls.
Mr. Merz’s willingness to rely on support from the AfD, broke a taboo in German politics that had endured since the end of World War II.
It left Mr. Merz facing fierce criticism from political opponents, religious leaders, Holocaust survivors and former Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who remains a member of Mr. Merz’s party. Tens of thousands demonstrated outside of conservative Christian Democrats’ party offices across the country.
Despite the criticism and several chances to step back, Mr. Merz decided to bring a bill beefing up migration rules to the floor of the house on Friday. It failed.
Mr. Merz had been trying to cement his advantage by showing voters he could be trusted to respond to widespread outrage over a series of seemingly unrelated killings by immigrants across Germany in the last year. But even with the AfD, he was unable to find the votes for a change that could actually become law.
The outcome was about the worst Mr. Merz would have hoped to avoid: no change to immigration law, newly energized opponents on both the left and the extreme right, and public doubts about his fitness to be chancellor.
Critics are now warning that Mr. Merz, if he becomes chancellor, could further break the country’s so-called firewall against extremists and work with the AfD to form a government. AfD leaders say the drama has emboldened and legitimized their party.
Journalists and many political analysts ripped Mr. Merz’s decision-making. “The chancellor candidate miscalculated,” wrote Fabian Reinbold in Die Zeit, one of the country’s most important weekly papers. “And now the damage is great, for him personally, but possibly also for a democracy that must stand up to its enemies.”
Mr. Merz’s decisions this week jolted what had been a static campaign before the German election on Feb. 23.
A race that was firmly focused on Germany’s faltering economy has suddenly become all about the far right and its top issue, migration — a potential boost to both Mr. Merz’s mainstream opponents and the AfD, which sits second in national polls.
Polls continue to show Mr. Merz with the best chance of winning the race and forming the next government. Voters remain angry at the incumbent party, the Social Democrats, over inflation and economic stagnation, and still appear eager to move on from the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
But Mr. Merz has changed the race and given his rivals a new argument.
The shake-up, and Mr. Merz’s decisions that caused it, followed a knife attack that killed two people, one of them a toddler, in Bavaria by an Afghan immigrant who the authorities have said has a mental illness and had avoided deportation.
Mr. Merz expressed outrage, then set a course meant to assure voters that the Christian Democrats could be counted on to overhaul immigration law.
He brought two separate motions to the floor of Parliament on Wednesday, one focused on securing borders and deportations of migrants who had been ordered out of the country, and the other focused on giving the authorities more power to ensure national security.
Both motions included language attacking the AfD. But the AfD voted for them anyway, and its support for the motion dealing specifically with borders and deportations helped it pass.
“We owe it to the people in our country, and not least to the victims of the acts of violence of recent months, to now make every effort to limit illegal migration, to take asylum seekers who are obliged to leave the country into custody and finally to deport them,” Mr. Merz told lawmakers. He added that it would be “unbearable” to watch the AfD celebrating the passage of the law.
The following day, Ms. Merkel made a rare public comment, decrying Mr. Merz’s reliance on a party that winks at Nazi slogans and which many, including the domestic intelligence services, consider a threat to the country’s Constitution.
“I believe it is wrong,” Ms. Merkel said in a statement, “to knowingly enable a majority in the German Bundestag to vote with the AfD for the first time.”
Others did too. Albrecht Weinberg, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor, announced that he would be returning a medal bestowed on him in 2017.
For years, mainstream parties had refused to work with the far right. Even as the AfD won a growing share of votes in national elections, mainstream party leaders assured Germans that the party would be kept out of government.
Mr. Merz’s political maneuver was designed to recapture voters who have drifted to the hard right. But for now, it appears to have backfired, with the AfD seeming to be the only clear winner in the affair.
When the measure passed on Wednesday — by a razor-thin victory, with several members of Mr. Merz’s party abstaining — AfD party leaders cheered. They exchanged hugs and took a group selfie on the parliament floor. Mr. Merz sat just feet away, looking glum.
A gloating Alice Weidel, the AfD’s chancellor candidate, told reporters afterward that Wednesday’s vote showed it was possible that the elections could produce a governing majority in Parliament if the far right and the conservatives worked together.
On Friday, rival mainstream parties tried to find a way to get the conservatives to pull back from the brink, offering to shelve the bill temporarily by sending it back to committee. But after a three-hour break in Parliament, Mr. Merz insisted on a vote, which he lost by a narrow margin of 12 votes.
In effect, he doubled down, stepping back from a call he had made in November, after Mr. Scholz’s three-party coalition collapsed, for mainstream parties to avoid working with the far right to pass legislation.
One question now is whether Mr. Merz can reunite his fractured coalition. Another is whether, if he becomes chancellor, he might go even further in allowing collaboration between conservatives and far right.
Several lawmakers this week evoked Austria, where a governing coalition between the hard-right Freedom Party and the center-right Austrian People’s party now looks likely. It would be the first time the far right ran a governing coalition, though it had been a minority partner before.
Mr. Merz continues to say he will not entertain such a coalition — but that the migration issue demanded action, even if that meant voting with the AfD.
“There are many who may be concerned about the stability of our democracy,” Mr. Merz said Friday, before the vote, “but there are at least as many who are concerned about the security and internal order of our country.”
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