Liliea
Dagobah Resident
Germany’s parliament rejects radical migration plan
Following the debacle in parliament over the rejection of a bill calling for stricter immigration rules that risked becoming the first bill to pass thanks to CDU, with the backing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland AfD, the Social Democrats and the Greens refused to negotiate because they prefer to make the political betrayal of the Union parties a campaign issue.CDU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has failed to deliver on his promises to change Germany's migration policy, something that has become the workhorse (or Trojan horse) of the left for Germans, who could tip the balance towards the right-wing AfD and thus legitimise them.
AP“You don’t have to tear down a firewall with a wrecking ball to set your own house on fire. It’s enough to keep drilling holes,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green, said in Friday’s debate. “First a motion on Wednesday, then a bill today — what’s coming next?”
Merz said: “You can’t seriously believe that we are reaching out our hand to a party that wants to destroy us?” He said he will “do everything in the coming weeks, months and if necessary years so that this party doesn’t continue to grow and becomes a peripheral phenomenon again as soon as possible.”
“People out there ... don’t want us to argue with each other about AfD,” he said. “They want us to reach solutions to the questions with which people concern themselves in their everyday lives, and above all we want to reach solutions so that people in our country can feel safe again.”
Complaints and riots were not long in coming as the CDU headquarters in Berlin was evacuated; in Leipzig, thousands gathered on the market square, shouting: ‘all of Leipzig hates the CDU’, and even left-wing militants briefly stormed the CDU offices in Hannover.
And who gains from these political squabbles? Evidently the AfD would further consolidate its position as the stable political party and would be able to climb back up the percentage in the polls that showed them in second place with around 20% support.

In the absence of party unity and the tension of debate, parallels have been drawn with the events that led the Nazi party to seize power through the political process. The Guardian recalls that the vote takes place a few days after the commemoration at Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of the liberation and recalls how 15 years ago, Eva Umlauf, 82, who survived Auschwitz in a letter to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, she wrote: “We all know how German politicians once thought they could cooperate with Hitler and the Nazi party. Keep them in check. And how in just a few years, our democracy became a dictatorship. Peace became war.”
On the other hand, the most quoted response in the German media from the AfD since the vote was that of MP Bernd Baumann, who said:
Guardian“This is truly a historic moment … Mr Merz, you helped bring it about and now you stand here with shaking knees, trembling and apologising,” he said, before declaring: “Here and now a new epoch begins.”
German opposition's migration bill narrowly defeated amid controversy over far-right support
Germany's parliament has narrowly rejected an opposition-sponsored bill calling for tougher rules on migration that risked becoming the first draft legislation to pass thanks to a far-right party.


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Ex-chancellor makes rare intervention to criticise her own party for passing asylum policy with support of AfD