The German Bundestag passed opposition leader Friedrich Merz’s symbolic five-point migration motion on Wednesday, which promised a dramatic tightening of the country’s migration and asylum laws.
Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Union party and currently leads in the polls to become the next chancellor, said he would collect votes from all parties to push his five-point migration plan through parliament despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s strong opposition.
Support of the plan from the far-right Alternative for Germany has rattled social democrats in the country even though Merz insisted he did not seek AfD’s support adding that the policy wasn’t wrong just because the “wrong people back it.”
“Thinking about how the AfD fraction will cheer and their happy faces makes me feel uncomfortable,” Merz told fellow lawmakers. The motion calls for permanent border controls, the rejection of asylum seekers, and the detention of foreigners who have been issued an order to leave the country.
The measures are nonbinding, but Merz could now push for a decision on the law’s passage through parliament as early as this week.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has waded into Germany politics with the controversial support of the AfD telling a crowd virtually at a campaign event that “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents.”
Immigration has become a central election issue in Germany following a knife attack a week ago in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg by a rejected asylum-seeker, which left a man and a 2-year-old boy dead. That attack was preceded by knife attacks in Mannheim and in Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria.
“How many more children have to become victims of such acts of violence before you also believe there is a threat to public safety and order?” Merz asked.
Chancellor Scholz, the social democrat whose coalition government folded last year, scolded Merz for his motion. “Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany over 75 years ago, there has always been a clear consensus among all democrats in our parliaments: We do not make common cause with the far right.”
Germany’s national election are scheduled for Feb. 23.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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