SCHWERIN, Germany — In many ways, it’s a classic German city. A picture-postcard colorful old town with a Gothic cathedral. A 19th century castle overlooking ornate lakeside gardens. And deep divisions over who belongs and who doesn’t.
The country’s election campaign has shone a light on the fracture at the heart of Europe’s largest nation. So much of the debate ahead of the Feb. 23 vote has come down to migration — those who consider an influx of foreigners as a fundamental threat to German society, and those pushing for more inclusivity and less stigma.
These debates have always been there, of course. But this election, where the anti-immigrant far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party is polling in second place — which, if confirmed at Sunday’s election, would be unprecedented in the country’s postwar history — has brought it into sharp relief.
Nowhere is the choice as stark as in Schwerin, a city of 100,000 in Germany’s northeast. Here, one of the contests for a seat in the country’s parliament pits a migration official in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government who came to Germany as an immigrant against a top politician from the AfD.
Migration “is overshadowing the entire election campaign,” said Reem Alabali-Radovan, the migration official, who has represented the district in parliament for the center-left Social Democrats, or SPD, since 2021. A few weeks ago, someone sprayed black paint over her face on one of her campaign billboards, writing, “Go home.”
Although parties like hers had planned to focus their campaigns on other issues, like the economy or education, “events have made migration the main issue now — and there’s a competition [among some parties] to outdo each other in terms of proposing restrictive measures.”
Battle lines have hardened in the wake of a car being driven into a Christmas market in December, a deadly knife attack in January and then a taboo-breaking parliamentary vote that saw the likely next conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, use far-right support for the first time as he pushed for a migration crackdown.
“It pains me that this is how the issue is being debated — it’s important that we ensure security, but migration is much more than that,” Alabali-Radovan told POLITICO. “I would like us to separate [the two issues] more clearly, to pay attention to the issues and the choice of words, and not, as Merz or the [center-right Christian Democratic] Union often do, to place entire population groups under general suspicion.”
Her main opponent in the district, the AfD’s Leif-Erik Holm, is among those pushing for the strictest controls on migration because, as he told a crowd of supporters in Schwerin, he considers it an “existential” threat to the country.
“It is, of course, the dominant issue,” Holm told POLITICO before his speech. After the attacks in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg, he added, “that is also the dominant thing that you hear [from voters] at information stands — that things can’t go on like this, they can’t come to terms with this migration issue.”
Speaking to supporters, Holm described the arrival of migrants in Schwerin and the surrounding areas — including at a refugee center in the city — as posing long-term risks to the area’s identity and security.
“We have cities that have already shifted so much that you can hardly recognize them as Germany anymore,” he told the crowd. “And in Schwerin we are experiencing this progress — which is not progress at all, but of course a step backward — also developing in this way.”
Becoming more radical
No one knows yet which vision will win out in Schwerin. The website zweitstimme.org, which publishes election forecasts, sees a likely victory for Holm and the AfD.
That would track along with trends in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania as a whole, which show a marked shift toward the AfD and away from the SPD since the last federal election in 2021.
At that time, the SPD won 29 percent in the state, 11 points ahead of the AfD — but recent polling puts the AfD in a strong first-place position this time around, with 29 percent to the SPD’s 21 percent.
In addition to serving as a member of parliament, Alabali-Radovan leads the German government’s anti-racism efforts and serves as a top official on migration and refugee policy. She has personal experience with the issue: She was born in Moscow to parents from Iraq and the family came to Germany when she was a child.
“People have become more radical — the statements are more radical, more extreme. Sometimes you can’t even have a conversation anymore,” Alabali-Radovan said. “And that worries me, that it’s become so entrenched that you can’t accomplish much with conversations anymore. That’s the mood at the moment. And it reflects the public debate.”
The post The city that exposes Germany’s deep migration divide appeared first on Politico.
