Last Sunday, two weeks before the elections in Germany, the public broadcasters hosted the Kanzlerduell: a 90-minute debate between the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the SPD, and his main challenger, Friedrich Merz of the CDU. Thankfully, Merz was wearing glasses, as it was otherwise difficult to tell the two old men apart: both had bald heads, dark suits, and an obsession with immigrants.
Scholz used the national stage to present himself as a racist hardliner: “We have increased the number of deportations by 70 percent since I became chancellor,” he said at one point. Scholz’s coalition passed the strictest laws against immigration in German history. Yet Merz claimed, again and again, that Scholz was still not doing enough.
The entire evening was a long competition to show who was more racist. U.S. readers will be familiar with this dynamic: Kamala Harris, instead of pushing back against Donald Trump’s racist fear-mongering, claimed that she would be more effective at building the wall and implementing other racist policies. There is no indication that this will work for Scholz any better than it did for Harris: the latest polls show Merz’s conservatives at or above 30 percent, while Scholz’s social democrats are around 15 or 16 percent.
Fearmongering
The election campaign has been dominated by a murder that took place in late January in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. A man from Afghanistan seeking asylum in Germany attacked a group of small children in a park, killing a two-year-old as well as a man who tried to protect them. After this gruesome act, all political parties have been calling for more deportations — even the Green Party is campaigning with a ten-point plan to reduce immigration.
The child’s family was from Morocco, and his body was taken there for burial. They have not spoken to the press, but it’s hard to imagine them demanding more deportations. Merz has been claiming that he was moved to tears thinking about the child’s death. Yet he had no such reaction to the thousands of children in Gaza who have been burned alive, decapitated, shot, or buried in the rubble of their homes in Gaza. Scholz and Merz are both in perfect agreement about sending weapons to Israel — children be damned.
For the last leg of the campaign, Merz attempted a big parliamentary maneuver to get out ahead of the other parties in this xenophobic competition. The CDU introduced a resolution and a draft law in the Bundestag calling for the de facto abolition of the right to asylum (which is guaranteed in the German constitution) and the permanent closure of German borders (which goes against EU laws and the Schengen Agreement). This “vice signaling” was intended to put the focus on immigration — Merz was hoping to put the brakes on the far-right AfD, by presenting himself as the racist politician who could get laws passed.
This was an ultimatum to the social democrats — they would allow Merz to take the lead on anti-immigrant policy, or his motion would get passed with the support of the AfD. The latter option would violate the “firewall” policy that Merz himself had advocated just a few months earlier, with all parties refusing to work with the AfD in the Bundestag. After days of hectic negotiating, Merz’s resolution won a majority on January 29 with AfD support. The Far Right was triumphant.
Mass Protests
Two days later, however, the CDU failed to get a majority on its proposed law. Several dozen MPs from Merz’s own party boycotted the second vote. What had happened? Some attributed this to a rare public statement by Angela Merkel, former chancellor and Merz’s predecessor as CDU chair, who said she never would have voted with the AfD. Merkel, despised by the Right for welcoming refugees in 2015, has been Merz’s bitter rival for decades. Yet her intervention was secondary.
What happened on January 29 was a series of spontaneous mass mobilizations against the CDU’s collaboration with the AfD. People occupied CDU offices. On February 2, a quarter of a million people demonstrated in Berlin under the motto: “We are the firewall!” A week later, another quarter of a million people took to the streets in Munich (a larger demonstration, as it is a much smaller city). Cities all over the country saw tens of thousands protesting.
While these protests are often framed as “defending democracy,” the organizers’ demands are extremely limited. The objections are about voting together with the AfD — not about the CDU (and other parties) supporting the AfD’s anti-immigrant proposals. Both Scholz and his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock of the Greens, called on Merz to pass anti-immigration laws together with the “democratic parties.”
The disagreement is not really about democracy versus authoritarianism — both sides want to expand police powers and deport more people. Different wings of the German ruling class are arguing about how to best implement new racist policies. Scholz and Baerbock want to work within the EU institutions to make a restrictive Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Merz, in contrast, wants to present the EU with fait accompli. For another analogy with U.S. politics, Merz advocates a “Germany First” policy, whereas his opponents are institutionalists.
An Independent Policy
With just a week left until the elections, millions of people are horrified at the Rechtsruck, the shift to the right. The “common sense” propagated by bourgeois newspapers and politicians says they all need to “vote tactically.” Yet this means different things for different people: some say that voting for the Green candidate Robert Habeck can stop Merz from becoming chancellor. Others instead call for a vote for the reformist Left Party, Die Linke. Both parties have seen thousands of new members joining.
The irony is that neither of these parties fundamentally opposes Merz’s plans: the Greens are campaigning for more deportations; Die Linke generally avoids the topic, and is currently in two state governments that deport people every day. Many of these new members recognize this contradiction, but feel they have to “do something.”
Yet the last few weeks have given very direct evidence of what people can do: the masses were able to change the parliamentary relation of forces by protesting, with no trip to the polls necessary. Over the last 15 years, Die Linke has proven that voting for a reformist party is no way to stop deportations (or evictions, privatizations, police brutality, or anything else). When Die Linke has gotten particularly good results, they have always joined government coalitions and carried out racist, neoliberal policies themselves.
The working class needs an independent policy. That’s why Inés Heider, a social worker from Berlin, and Leonie Lieb, a hospital midwife from Munich, both ofKlasse Gegen Klasse, and Franziska Thomas from Berlin, of the RSO, are running for the Bundestag. They are running on a proudly anticapitalist program that opposes all deportations and calls for equal rights. They are not promising to implement their policies in parliament — instead, they are using the campaign to support strikes, demonstrations, blockades, and other working-class methods to advance our interests.