The fall of the German firewall

On Wednesday the 29th of January 2025, the “Brandmauer” or “firewall” started to collapse, and German politics shifted forever. This is the cordon sanitaire in which the main political parties all agreed never to cooperate with Alternative for Germany (AfD), the hard-right party which is now second in the polls before the election in February. 

The cause was an anti-migration motion in the Bundestag, which passed with 348 votes to 344, with 10 abstentions. It had been laid by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the centre-right party, and was also backed by the FDP, a liberal and free market party which until recently was part of the ruling coalition. However, it only passed with votes from the AfD and some affiliated members without a party. 

As strange as it might sound, the firewall was so strong that motions which might have only passed with AfD support have previously been withdrawn, just to avoid that happening. Therefore the CDU’s acceptance that they would pass it only with AfD votes, constitutes the first step to the ending of the firewall and the return of democratic politics to Germany.

Even though the motion accuses the AfD of conspiracy theories and xenophobia, it passing with the votes of the AfD was enough to bring down a storm of fury from the left-wing establishment. A huge protest was held in front of the CDU’s offices and their staffers had to evacuate to hide from the mob. Nancy Faeser, the Interior Minister, accused the CDU of leaving the “democratic centre”, calling them “oblivious to history”. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he “needed some time to process”, as if he was an LA Valley Girl undergoing therapy. 

Unsurprisingly there was an open letter by various artists and actors, while the radical art group The Centre for Political Beauty depicted the leaders of the CDU and AfD getting married along with the caption “Team Hitler”. It’s indicative of the levels of left-wing hysteria that this art group previously set up a website calling for the AfD to be banned and put a dummy prison covered in pictures of AfD leaders behind bars in front of the Federal Chancellery. Unsurprisingly, they feature a quote on their website by Robert Habeck, the Green politician and Vice Chancellor of Germany. Are they really artistic rebels or just regime thugs? 

It hasn’t just been the left, however. Former Chancellor Merkel has emerged from retirement to criticise Friedrich Merz, the current leader of the CDU she once led. She has called on him to only work with other “democratic parties”, by which she means anyone but the AfD, in order to prevent “terrible attacks” like those in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg. But therein lies the issue. Parties of the left, like the SPD and the Greens, don’t want to tackle Germany’s broken asylum system or reduce migration. 

So long as the firewall exists, they have the power to stop any reform as well. Although there has been moralising about the firewall, it is also good politics for the left because it means that in Germany’s coalition-reliant electoral system, the centre-right is forced to make deals with them. That pushes politics to the left, even though current polling shows over half of Germans intend to vote for a party of the right.

The fruits of this are clear to anyone who reads a paper. Just a day after the vote came a report that a 17-year-old Syrian asylum seeker, who’d only been in Germany for a few months, spotted a 34-year-old woman on the train coming back from a party. When she got off, he followed her and raped her only a few hundred metres from the nearest police station. Then he got back on the train and returned to his refugee centre accommodation, one kilometre away.

Merkel is therefore the reason why the AfD turned from a fringe Eurosceptic party into a successful anti-immigration populist party

Germany wasn’t like this before Merkel opened the borders to millions of refugees in 2015. In the subsequent decade, however, Germans have gotten used to regular reports of terrorism, rape, and murder by those they welcomed in. It was this which has driven many into the arms of the AfD, as the only party serious about ending this issue. Ironically, Merkel is therefore the reason why the AfD turned from a fringe Eurosceptic party into a successful anti-immigration populist party.

If Mutti, as Merkel was sometimes called, and the left, who complain endlessly about the rise of fascism, were serious, then there is a much simpler and more democratic way to defeat the AfD. All they need to do would be to listen to German voters and end the asylum chaos. Instead, not a single member of one of the left-wing parties was willing to vote for the CDU’s anti-migration motion. The left’s revealed preference is to choose mass immigration and the danger that brings the German people, over stopping the AfD.

Thankfully this first step brings the firewall closer to destruction. Already, the CDU in the east of Germany are saying they want to vote alongside the AfD in state parliaments. The firewall and the success of the AfD in the East had led to ludicrous coalitions, in which the CDU ended up allying with the hard-left just to keep the AfD out. That has increasingly meant the AfD take on the position of the real opposition, while the CDU is so hobbled by their coalitions that they are unable to achieve the reforms they want. 

Friedrich Merz seems to know that. Since that fateful vote, he has accepted the AfD’s votes for a motion on inflation and told a voter that he would also accept AfD votes after the election. The unprecedented criticism from Merkel and the left still only resulted in a dozen CDU MPs refusing to vote with their colleagues and the AfD on the inflation motion. That’s a rebellion, not a split. 

With the CDU ahead in the polls, but not by enough to form a majority government, it seemed likely they would have to go into coalition with the SPD or Greens, or both. Now that is less of a certainty. The left is furious with the CDU and with the possibility of using AfD votes, when they are currently second in the polls, a minority government might be possible. Whatever happens, the firewall is crumbling just like the Berlin Wall did before it.