“All of Hamburg hates the AfD,” tens of thousands of demonstrators chanted in Germany’s second-largest city on 19 January this year. People had taken to the streets all over Germany to protest against the far-right Alternative for Germany after it was revealed that some of its politicians had met the prominent Austrian new-right activist Martin Sellner in a Potsdam hotel to discuss “remigration,” the expulsion of millions of migrants from Germany.
That outrage is now little more than a distant memory. Late last month the parliament of the East German state of Brandenburg debated an AfD motion to exclude asylum seekers and refugees from all public events. The party argued that such a ban was a necessary consequence of the murder of three people by a Syrian asylum seeker at a “festival of diversity” in the West German city of Solingen a week earlier. The motion didn’t prompt reactions of the kind witnessed in January; the rage of a few months ago had made way for a resigned shrugging of shoulders.
That’s mainly because politicians from other parties have also turned against refugees. Another populist party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, whose eponymous founder was once a leader of the left-wing Die Linke, is echoing the AfD’s anti-migrant rhetoric. Leading Christian Democrats have demanded that no more Syrian or Afghan asylum seekers be admitted to Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his interior minister, the Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, have been calling for more deportations, a tightening of border controls and a tough new asylum regime, and their government is busily announcing new administrative measures and drafting legislation to restrict the number of people seeking Germany’s protection.
Far from stealing a march on the AfD, however, these efforts seem only to have strengthened its position. Less than a month after the parliamentary debate in Brandenburg the far-right party won 29.2 per cent of the vote in the local state elections. Another 13.5 per cent voted for the Wagenknecht party, whose Brandenburg chapter was set up as recently as late May.
Not too long ago, such a result would have sent shock waves across Germany. This one brought only more shoulder-shrugging. Olaf Scholz, commenting on the outcome while attending the UN General Assembly in New York, focused on the fact that his own party, the Social Democrats, had scored 1.7 percentage points more than the far right: “It’s marvellous that we won,” he beamed.
Maybe Scholz was comparing the result with the state elections in Thuringia three weeks earlier. There, the AfD came first with 32.8 per cent, almost ten points ahead of the second-placed Christian Democrats and almost twenty-five points ahead of the Social Democrats. If they joined forces, the AfD and the Wagenknecht party would command a comfortable majority in Thuringia. That’s unlikely to happen soon, but the two parties don’t merely share a hostility towards immigration: they are also socially conservative, oppose Germany’s military support for Ukraine, and are seemingly unconcerned about climate change.
That’s the new normal: migration as the reputed source of all ills; a race to the bottom to keep asylum seekers out; a far-right party that, at least in East Germany, is supported by about a third of voters. How did it come to this?
Rewind to the late summer of 2015. The federal government, then led by the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, made it possible for hundreds of thousands of refugees to seek protection in Germany. Some 890,000 asylum seekers, many of them Syrians travelling via the Balkans and Austria, arrived in 2015. True, there were loud and occasionally violent protests against the influx, but most Germans welcomed the new arrivals.
On 31 August of that year, Merkel produced the most famous line of her sixteen years in office: “Wir schaffen das” (We are able to do this). She sought to reassure Germans that their country could accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees. Perhaps more importantly, her “we” implied a “they”: arsonists and rioters who were trying to prevent the authorities from housing asylum seekers in their neighbourhood. “We” won’t be deterred by a few racist thugs, she seemed to implore her fellow Germans.
“We need to clearly distance ourselves” from the arsonists and rioters, said Merkel. “The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their anti-refugee] stance.” At the time, I used that quote in Inside Story to explain why Germany was different: why, unlike Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, the German response was shaped by a powerful discourse about the inviolable dignity of all those living in Germany.
As somebody who had been keenly interested in Australian government and civil society responses to asylum seekers, refugees and migrants more generally, I decided to write a history of German refugee and asylum politics and policies. I expected such a study not least to demonstrate to Australians that an alternative approach to forced migration was feasible. In 2018, I moved to Germany — which I had left thirty-three years earlier and where I had only once, in 1989–90, returned for more than a few weeks — to research a book about local responses to refugees in Hamburg and regional Saxony since the fall of the Wall.
The Germany I got to know six years ago had little in common with the Germany I remembered, nor with the Australia I had left. I had my first taste of Australia’s response to asylum seekers immediately after my arrival in June 1985 when the Hawke government panicked about the landfall of just five West Papuan refugees on an island in the Torres Strait. A few years later, in the early 1990s, the arrival of relatively few “boat people” prompted the Keating government to introduce mandatory and unlimited detention for all those reaching Australia by boat and without a visa.
Then, in 2001, SAS special forces seized the Norwegian container carrier Tampa after its captain sought to disembark on Christmas Island a group of asylum seekers he had rescued in the Indian Ocean. Prime minister John Howard reassured Australians that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” and his government ruled that “boat people” would be barred from seeking Australia’s protection and instead incarcerated on Nauru and Manus. Eventually, the Labor Party endorsed that policy, which also enjoyed broad public support.
In the Germany I remembered, the vilification of asylum seekers, and xenophobia more generally, had been commonplace. In 1980, when the number of asylum applications exceeded 100,000 for the first time, the government introduced measures to make successful asylum claims more difficult and deter prospective applicants. Asylum seekers were no longer allowed to work, and in several states were required to live in designated camps. Because the approval rate of asylum claims plummeted, accusations that most applicants were “bogus” grew louder. Late in that decade — at a time when West Germany needed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of East Germans and ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania — asylum applications increased again.
By then, the Christian Democrats were demanding that the right of asylum enshrined in the (West) German constitution be scrapped. Particularly after the fall of the Wall in November 1989, the incessant talk in the media and by leading politicians about “bogus asylum seekers,” “asylum fraud” and “economic refugees” was accompanied by acts of violence against refugees and their accommodation. For several days in August 1992 a mob laid siege to and threw petrol bombs at a high-rise building housing asylum seekers and Vietnamese contract labourers in the East German port city of Rostock. This pogrom-like violence was taken as another reason to remove the right of asylum from the Constitution.
In November 1992 a majority of Social Democrats caved in to demands and voted for constitutional change. Six months later parliament decided that no right of asylum would be available to people who entered Germany from an EU member state or from another country committed to upholding the Refugee Convention and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Germany had effectively decided to shut its doors to people seeking protection, including refugees from the Balkans.
And yet, just over twenty years later, Germans surprised the rest of the world with their Willkommenskultur, or welcoming culture, even though many of the arrivals in 2015 were Muslims and most of them hailed from outside Europe. At last, so it appeared to some outside observers, members of the nation responsible for the Holocaust and the second world war were redeeming themselves. Germans might not have shared that interpretation, but many of them were pleased that some their neighbours subscribed to it.
I don’t want to idealise Germany’s response to asylum seekers that year. Some of the violence directed at refugees resembled what had been on display in Rostock in 1992. When young men from North Africa were among the perpetrators of sexual violence in Cologne on New Year’s Eve that year, the proportion of Germans who still embraced a Willkommenskultur dropped dramatically.
Rifts were also appearing within the Merkel-led government. In January 2016, interior minister Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union proposed a cap of 200,000 on the number of asylum seekers to be accommodated by Germany each year.
In September 2017 the AfD, then the only party demanding that Germany no longer accept refugees, won 12.6 per cent in the federal election, the first time in the history of the Federal Republic that a party of the far right had scored more than 5 per cent at a national election. “The migration issue is the mother of all political problems in this country,” Seehofer said the following year.
In 2018 that was still a minority opinion. Some of Merkel’s Christian Democrats were grumbling, but the majority supported the chancellor’s strong opposition to Seehofer’s proposal of an upper limit. Germans really did seem to have been able “to do this.” Many of those who had arrived between 2014 and 2016 had learned German, found a job and had their asylum claim approved. New arrivals were no longer in the news and the focus had shifted to those who perished en route to Europe.
When Italy and Malta prevented a ship operated by the search-and-rescue organisation Mission Lifeline from disembarking people it had rescued in the Mediterranean, protests erupted all over Germany. Here, the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions resonated particularly loudly. Three out of four Germans supported the idea that the work of these missions was of crucial importance.
Last year, though, hardly anybody complained about their systematic obstruction. Olaf Scholz even distanced himself from Germany’s allocation of €8 million over four years for private search and rescue efforts, although the funds had been agreed by the three coalition parties and decided by a vote in parliament. Earlier than others in his party, the chancellor sensed that the electorate had little appetite for measures that might increase the number of asylum seekers in Germany.
The public discourse here about “illegal arrivals” reminds me of similar talk in Australia, but Germany still has a long way to go until its public policy response to refugees resembles Australia’s. True, several European governments — including the one in Berlin — have shown interest in copying the “Australian solution.” Twenty years ago, Otto Schily, interior minister in a coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens, advocated outsourcing refugee status determinations to countries outside Europe and referred to Australia’s Pacific Solution as a model. A few months ago, the interior ministry conducted consultations exploring whether Australia’s response to “boat people” could be emulated. Most of the experts invited to these consultations strongly advised against pursuing such an approach.
Other EU member states have already gone further than Germany. The Netherlands would like to opt out of the common European asylum system altogether. No surprise there, since the far right Freedom Party had decisively won the 2023 elections. Denmark has long championed a ruthless response to refugees. Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy, has arranged for refugees intercepted in the Mediterranean to be processed in Albania. And it is not hard to guess the attitude of a government led by the far right Austrian Freedom Party and its extremist leader Herbert Kickl, the winner of the election held on 30 September.
But even Kickl and Meloni can’t do as they please, because their countries are bound by the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which ensure they can’t simply copy Australia’s approach. That’s not to say that Australia won’t increasingly be upheld as a shining beacon by leaders across the EU.
Within the European context, German public sentiment and the Scholz government’s position are no longer exceptional. With surprisingly little controversy, Scholz and his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock of the Greens, agreed to a change in the Common European Asylum System that allows for asylum seekers, including children, to be detained at Europe’s external borders. While Australia’s approach can’t be emulated, the German government seems destined to take its cue from neighbours including Denmark and the Netherlands.
For me, the most interesting question is not whether Germany’s response to refugees is or could be akin to Australia’s, but whether Germany in 2024 resembles Germany in 1992.
Some of the parallels are striking. As in the early 1990s, we are witnessing a rapid radicalisation of the discourse about refugees. As in the early 1990s, that discourse is not the exclusive domain of the far right but is also employed by centre-right and centre-left politicians. As in the early 1990s, the vilification of asylum seekers has been morphing into a vilification of people who are visibly different, regardless of their legal status. As in the early 1990s, racist talking begets racist violence, bringing an increase in attacks on asylum seekers and their homes.
Yet the two periods are also very different. Social media is engendering a more dynamic development of discourses and public sentiments. And the current opposition to legislation depriving asylum seekers of rights is weak: when parliament voted to change the German constitution in May 1993, 100,000 protesters converged on Bonn (still the seat of government) in a mobilisation that would be unthinkable today.
Two other differences make me hopeful. In 1993, parliament did away with the unconditional right of asylum enshrined in Article 16 of the German Basic Law. Only a few years later, though, that change was rendered almost meaningless by the Maastricht Treaty. Thereafter Germany had to apply European law — and this meant the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol — when deciding about asylum claims. It would be much more difficult to change European refugee and human rights law now than it was to change the German constitution in 1993.
German governments are also constrained by those parts of the Constitution that must never be changed, particularly its Article 1 (1): “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” It’s to Angela Merkel’s credit that she kept reminding Germans that this article covers not just German citizens but all those living in Germany, regardless of their legal status.
Regulations and laws that clearly violate the human dignity of people seeking Germany’s protection can be challenged in the Constitutional Court, which ruled in 2012 that it is unconstitutional to deter prospective asylum seekers by cutting their benefits. In its judgement, the court argued:
Migration-policy considerations to keep benefits for asylum seekers and refugees low in order to avoid incentives for migration, which may be set by relatively high benefits compared to international standards, may generally not justify any reduction of benefits below the physical and sociocultural minimum existence… Human dignity, guaranteed in Article 1.1 of the Basic Law, may not be modified in light of migration-policy considerations.
It’s the accelerating shift in sentiment that is most striking. A couple of weeks before the Brandenburg state election, an opinion poll revealed that 40 per cent of voters considered migration, including forced migration, the most pressing issue, followed by education at 26 per cent. A few days later, 82 per cent of those polled in a nationwide survey demanded that Germany restrict immigration. These are especially dramatic figures. How to make sense of them?
On 31 May, a twenty-five-year-old man, who had arrived in Germany in 2013 as an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan and sought asylum, attacked several people in the centre of the West German city of Mannheim with a knife. One of the victims, a policeman, later died. On 23 August, a twenty-six-year-old Syrian asylum seeker killed three people in Solingen; his deeds were subsequently credited to the Islamic State jihadist group. Could the results of the state elections in September and the strength of the anti-immigration public sentiment be attributed to these murders?
Politicians of all major political parties — from the Greens to the AfD — called for a rethink of Germany’s asylum policies following the killings, and it might well be that the emphasis given by politicians and media commentators added to the sense that migration was a particularly pressing issue. But the first decisive shift in public opinion happened last year, and the public response was different from when an Islamic terrorist drove a truck onto a Berlin Christmas market, killing thirteen people, in December 2016. Those murders didn’t lead to widespread calls to close Germany’s borders, and a demand to exclude all asylum seekers and refugees from public events would have been widely ridiculed.
Germany registered just over 100,000 primary asylum applications in 2020, the lowest number since 2011. Applications picked up again in 2021 with close to 150,000, reached well over 200,000 the following year and peaked in 2023 with almost 330,000. Was the change of public sentiment in 2023 directly related to the high number of applications? That explanation would make little sense, because these numbers do not include Ukrainian refugees, more than one million of whom arrived in Germany in 2022. The following year, the overall number of Ukrainian refugees living in Germany increased only marginally. In other words, the total number of forced migrants arriving in Germany dropped sharply in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Another reason often cited in public debate is that Germany has reached its limits. “Wir schaffen das nicht mehr” (We are no longer able to do this), people are saying, referring to a lack of refugee accommodation, overcrowded schools and childcare centres, a shortage of German-language classes and local governments that don’t have the financial resources to look after the new arrivals. Some of these complaints are well founded, but while they receive a lot of coverage, local communities that cope well with increasing numbers of refugee arrivals don’t make it into the news.
In many cases the lack of capacity is also the result of federal government cuts, and they in turn are prompted by political decisions to prioritise other areas. To claim that Germany has the capacity to accommodate, say, 200,000 refugees per year but not more, is unconvincing. Why not 20,000? Why not 400,000? Close to a million refugees arrived in 2015 and Germany coped (albeit initially not particularly well, because the government was ill-prepared). Germany accommodated more than a million refugees in 2022 — and this time there were fewer resource problems.
A more credible explanation of why four out of five Germans want to restrict immigration is that this is also what the vast majority of opinion makers — in politics and in the media — are saying. They in turn claim that the only way of halting the rise of the AfD is to take on board those far-right demands that seem to enjoy popular support.
Yet studies by social scientists have shown that moderate parties that borrow such policies only strengthen the far right. The fallacy of the strategy has been evident in the contrasting response of two state premiers to the AfD. In Saxony, the Christian Democrat premier Michael Kretschmer took on board many of the AfD’s demands only to see the AfD’s vote rise to more than 30 per cent at the next election. In Schleswig-Holstein in Germany’s far north, Daniel Günther, another Christian Democrat, strongly disagrees with about everything the AfD says; at the last election there, the AfD didn’t reach the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter state parliament.
Kretschmer, Scholz and all those borrowing from the AfD’s anti-migrant rhetoric aren’t stupid. They are probably aware that the empirical evidence doesn’t support their strategy. If they are, the most likely implication is that they too are drawn to the dream of an ethnically homogeneous Germany, where asylum seekers are not welcome. That’s a frightening thought.
None of this entirely explains such a fundamental shift in public opinion. What that shift shows is how easily narcissism and indifference can trump compassion and solidarity. As I argued in Inside Story recently, indifference is a mental disposition that survived the end of Nazi Germany.
Those in favour of welcoming refugees are also to blame. They failed to engage Germans in a conversation about why exactly Germany ought to accommodate refugees and instead relied on unsustainable motivations and arguments: because we ought to be sorry for their plight, and because they are needed to address skilled labour shortages.
In this respect Germany has much in common with Australia. There too a discussion about good (sustainable) reasons why Australia ought to provide protection to refugees has been avoided in favour of the utilitarian argument and an appeal to emotions.
But the preconditions for a productive discussion are more favourable in Germany than in Australia. That’s because many Germans have at least heard of the inviolability of human dignity (which could be one good reason for accommodating refugees). But for such a reference to be effective, it’s not enough to cite Article 1 of the German constitution. It’s necessary to engage in a conversation about why the principle articulated in that article ought to be upheld.
Over the past few months, I have made dozens of presentations all over the country about my book. Towards the end of those talks I am often asked to tell an uplifting story. My book contains positive examples of solidarity and hospitality, and I usually happily comply. I would like to take that request as a cue for the conclusion of this essay.
The outlook may indeed not be as bleak as the foregoing suggests. I have been deeply impressed by the commitment of civil society activists I have met, particularly in East Germany, where activists fighting for the rights of refugees need to be patient, courageous and thick-skinned. As long as they don’t throw in the proverbial towel, there is hope.
To demand (as the opposition leader Friedrich Merz has done) that Germany must not admit any more Afghan and Syrian refugees because two young men, who happened to hail originally from Afghanistan and Syria respectively, killed four people in Mannheim and Solingen, is about as sensical as calling for measures specifically targeting men in their twenties. Yet these days most journalists don’t question statements that only amplify the current hysteria. Some still do, however, and they too make me hopeful.
Most Social Democrat and Green politicians who once spoke up for migrants have remained silent, presumably because they fear being disciplined by their party or punished at the ballot box. But signs of protest are slowly emerging. More than 10,000 Social Democrats have signed a “Standing Up for Dignity” declaration strongly criticising the Scholz government’s policy of deterrence and deportation. Several state executive committees of the Greens’ youth organisation have resigned en masse and left the party in protest at that same policy.
Local politicians are often much less concerned about toeing the party line or trying to conform with dominant public opinion. In the part of Hamburg where I live, local councillors — whether they’re from the Greens, the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats — routinely insist that they represent the interests of all residents, including those living undocumented or in asylum-seeker hostels.
Not only do they care, but they are also attentive to the circumstances and needs of migrants. While indifference may be the prevailing response, the attentiveness of a minority fills me with hope. •
