Immigration and Germany’s Election – A Brief Primer
The Federal Republic will hold elections on February 23rd; alongside a rapidly sinking economy, immigration is one of the biggest concerns for voters. Here are 6 of the more horrific and high profile reasons why this topic is so pressing:
February 2025: a Syrian man who investigators claim wanted to kill Jews stabbed a Spanish man visiting the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
February 2025: an Afghan asylum seeker killed a mother and her 2-year-old daughter and injured more than 30 people in a car ramming attack into a workers protest in Munich.
January 2025: an Afghan asylum seeker killed a 2-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man who intervened to help the child in Aschaffenburg.
December 2024: a Saudi Arabian doctor killed 6 and injured nearly 300 in a Christmas Market car ramming in Magdeburg.
August 2024: a Syrian asylum seeker killed 3 and injured 8 in a mass stabbing at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen.
May 2024: an Afghan asylum seeker killed a policeman and injured five others in a stabbing spree at an anti-Islam event in Mannheim.
Aside from these more well-known events, there are broader trends. The New York Post has reported how, in Nov 2024, Berlin’s Police Chief, Barbara Slowik, stated:
“There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful.’ Slowik explained that there ‘are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups.”
This isn't the first time Slowik has been so direct in her pronouncements. Andrew Hammel has previously quoted her in a very bleak piece about immigration and crime statistics for The Critic: “Bluntly stated, our numbers show that violence in Berlin is young, male, and has a non-German background.” These trends align with similar crime data from Sweden and Denmark – two countries that have been scrambling to reverse course on their immigration policies. (MEON Journal contributor Peter Ryan has published an extensive report for Gript on this topic.) What is specifically worth highlighting here, since immigration restrictionism is typically tarred as “far right” by those who wish to delegitimize the topic, is that Denmark is led by a Social Democrat centre-Left government, yet has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe.
In Germany, according to a highly disturbing documentary recently published by a British think tank, Afghans and Pakistanis are 16 times more likely than Germans to be implicated in rape. To point this out, however, could well be to risk persecution: “The slow dripfeed of a perverse new morality into the public domain”, said the journalist and former MEP Alex Phillips, who presents the documentary, “now essentially regards being a perceived racist as a far worse crime than being a rapist”
Young people are apparently increasingly turning toward the immigration restrictionist AfD, who both German and EU establishments relentlessly insist is some kind of inheritor to the legacy of National Socialism; an insistence that persists despite the fact that the AfD is led by a woman named Alice Weidel who has a Sri Lankan wife, and is a party with stated policy aims which many commentators describe as rather vanilla positions held by centre-right establishment parties from the 1990s and 2000s. An Irish journalist based in Germany, Dr Eoin Lenihan, has previously outlined in The European Conservative why this increasing youth support for the AfD is occurring. In one emblematic case:
“a 20-year-old woman was sentenced to prison for insulting a member of the largely migrant group who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg in 2020. The case caused international outcry when nine of the ten defendants received suspended sentences.”
Yes, 9 of 10 gang rapists were left free while a woman angry about a child being gang raped, and who then insulted one of the gang rapists, was imprisoned. Does this not lend serious credibility to the point made above that due to the “perverse new morality” that now characterises the Western European zeitgeist, “being a perceived racist” is now treated “as a far worse crime than being a rapist”? Dr. Lenihan goes on to write:
“Young Germans, frightened and uncertain about the future, are demanding that their elders—who only ever lived with abstract ideals of multiculturalism—listen to their very real concerns.”
And on the Left side of German politics, another one to watch is the new BSW party led by Sahra Wagenknecht. Wagenknecht too has discussed a drastic change in approach to immigration but, on top of addressing concerns about crime, has also come from the perspective of focussing on the protecting the interests of the German worker. Thomas Fazi has outlined in Compact Wagenknecht’s rejection of what she calls “lifestyle leftism” – a Left focussed on “consumption habits and moral attitudes” that is “urban, cosmopolitan, pro-globalization, pro-immigration, pro-identity politics” – and her embrace of what she calls “left conservatism”:
“a left that returns to its original mission of improving the lives of the working and middle classes but also understands that doing so means rejecting globalism—turning, instead, to the democratic nation-state as the only terrain on which it is possible to collectively challenge capitalism. Such a left appreciates that states should take care of the well-being of their own citizens, especially the most underprivileged, before they can for newcomers from far-flung places.”
During the 2015 immigration crisis in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is responsible for the crisis, deployed the catchphrase “Wir Schaffen Das” (“we can manage this”). However, now that it is clear the propaganda operation around this hyper-moralistic and truly radical social experiment has been dramatically undermined by horrific increases in terrorism and the worst forms of crime – as revealed by the State’s own official statistics, “Wir Schaffen Das” is now far more likely to be heard in sarcastic tones of mockery.
Dr Ralph Schoellhammer of Webster University of Vienna and MCC Budapest has done a very good election preview with The Spectator Australia, including an interesting segment on some of the realities of remigration. Notably, Dr Schoellhammer is not expecting any serious change off the back of this election, due to the stated decision of the probable Chancellor to be, Friedrich Merz – who has begun taking stronger positions against immigration – to refuse to work with his natural coalition partner, the AfD. Dr Schoellhammer does believe, however, that the table is being set for what will be far more interesting elections four years down the road. But given all the terrible realities that have unfolded in Germany as a result of reckless immigration policy, only a tiny sliver of which is highlighted in this essay, one really is left wondering how bad things must eventually get before the people of Germany demand meaningful change. They do not need to live like this.