With four weeks left until the 2025 general election, there’s a political algebra problem to which everyone is discreetly trying to find the answer. Let x be the number of deadly attacks carried out by perpetrators from majority-Muslim countries already known to the authorities, y be the number of innocent people killed, and z be the rise in support for the AfD. We know that z tends to go up with x and y – but by what factor?
This weekend’s surveys will give us something to go on. On Wednesday in Aschaffenburg, an Afghan asylum seeker with a psychiatric disorder attacked a Kindergarten group playing in a park, killing a toddler and a passer-by. Following Solingen and Magdeburg, this is the third such act of savagery within six months; the total death toll is now into double figures. After dropping down to 10 percent in the 2021 election, the AfD were polling at 17 percent last summer, 19 percent by Christmas, and 21 percent earlier this week. How much will they gain now: an extra percentage point? Two?
This is not the kind of maths anyone will publicly admit to doing, of course. But the AfD is very aware that there is an equation at work in its favour here. The party has already put in all the necessary groundwork, constantly profiling itself against immigration of all kinds since 2015. Recently, it went further, endorsing a policy of scaring off and forcibly removing even migrants already here legally: “Re-mi-gra-tion!” as leader Alice Weidel declaimed, syllable for syllable, in her conference speech.
So all Weidel had to do today was reiterate her party’s position that immigrants without leave to remain must be deported. This is the stated policy of every other major party, too. Yet the AfD has unique credibility here – despite its total lack of experience in government and current lack of path to power (due to mainstream parties having ruled out cooperation).
READ ALSO: How would a strong AfD election result impact foreigners in Germany?
The AfD has no track record – so holds all the cards
How so? Because, currently, all of the other major parties have no credibility on the issue whatsoever. Least of all the Greens, who have only recently stopped arguing against deportations from Germany – even of convicted criminals – on the grounds that they are inhumane. Similarly, the SPD has historically been reluctant to talk about ejecting dangerous individuals for fear that this would alienate left-leaning supporters. The FDP, meanwhile, long preferred to focus on the trendy topic of how to attract highly-paid IT developers and keep schtum about what to do with less attractive illicit arrivals….
The party which has the biggest credibility problem vis-à-vis immigration and asylum is, of course, the CDU/CSU. That’s why Merz & Söder have been talking a lot about making it harder to become German again and dual nationality. Voters, though, aren’t that stupid: they know that these attacks are not being perpetrated by the children of Gastarbeiter or newly-minted dual citizens. And now, in the wake of the Aschaffenburg attack, Merz is vowing to install permanent border checks and fly out deportees on a daily basis.
Leaving aside the issues of whether such checks would be legal under EU law (probably not; but there’d be a fudge) and of whether high-frequency repatriation flights are actually practicable (definitely not; the CSU already tried and failed): the real point is that voters have very little reason to believe anything the CDU/CSU says about migration.
The CDU/CSU are prisoners of their past
After all, for decades, the party line was that ‘Germany is not a country of immigration’; in 2010, Angela Merkel even declared that attempts to create a multicultural society had “failed entirely”. Five years later, her tune changed: “We’ll manage!” she famously said as a combined total of well over one million asylum applications were lodged in 2015-2016 and she posed for selfies with Syrian refugees. Whatever you thought of the decision to keep the borders open back then: many felt – with good reason – that they’d voted for one thing, but been given the opposite.
READ ALSO: What foreigners in Germany should know about the voting system
This is not me making the case for the AfD – I’ve written time and again about how dangerous they are: for Germany, for me, and for everyone who reads The Local. This is me explaining why, in this Bundestag campaign, the AfD is stealing the show. The stark reality is that, for over a decade in which every other major party has been in government at least once, Germany has been accepting asylum seekers at a far faster rate than its administration can handle. Every year since 2013, applications have been running at six-figures in a system dimensioned for well under 100,000 cases annually. As a result, there are some dangerous people in the country who cannot be monitored, treated, and, if necessary, deported before they become a danger.
These individuals are an infinitesimal minority, but every single one of them is one too many. A spate of headlines like today’s “Knife attacker kills man and child in public park” is sufficient to give the impression that the state is failing at its foremost duty: protecting its citizens. When states visibly fail, they lose legitimacy – and anti-system extremists like the AfD gain ground.
Most Germans are keeping a cool head
The fact that there hasn’t been a much larger jump in support for the far right shows that most Germans are keeping a cool head. However disgusted and worried they rightly are about what happened yesterday: most are fully aware that the vast majority of foreigners are not knife-wielding maniacs. Most understand that there are no easy answers to complex questions, no quick solutions to lasting problems. And most – almost 80 percent – are still not going to cast their vote for a party which can barely disguise its Nazi sympathies.
Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Fabian Sommer
They do, however, expect sensible and proportionate action to minimise the risk of this kind of horrific crime. It’s not often you’ll find me agreeing with a CSU politician, but as their home affairs spokeswoman and MP for Aschaffenburg Andrea Lindholz put it this morning: “The system is failing. There’s been enough talk; now things need to actually happen.” (Has she tried ringing Markus…?)
READ ALSO: Alice Weidel - German far-right's unlikely hope for chancellor
Fortuitously, things are happening. In 2024, asylum applications fell sharply, and the bulk of those made in 2022 and 2023 were lodged by Ukrainian women and children. Moreover, failures in the immigration, intelligence, and policing services revealed by the Magdeburg attack are already being tackled: there will be more surveillance and better coordination between various authorities. And time will do its work: the backlog of asylum cases from recent years will, slowly but surely, be cleared; the pool of potential violent attackers will become smaller again. People will see progress and, hopefully, regain trust in the state and the parties which uphold it.
Yet none of this changes the immediate electoral equation for 2025. To a terrifying extent, whether the AfD comes in at 20 percent or 25 percent on February 23rd now depends on whether another random madman starts stabbing people – and, if so, how many he manages to kill. I wish it were different – and hope it will be by 2029.
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