Pending Electoral Disaster Prompts German Government to Actually Try to Stop Illegal Immigration

The elections in Saxony and Thüringen were a slap in the face for the parties that govern Germany. The market-liberal Free Democrats (FDP) have been reduced to an irrelevant micro-party in both states. The Greens were banished entirely from the state parliament in Thüringen, and barely clawed their way over the 5% hurdle in Saxony. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), meanwhile, posted its worst results in each state since reunification – outdoing even its dismal 2019 showing, which in Thüringen especially even I did not think was possible.

But its disgrace is not over. Brandenburg will hold its own state elections on September 22nd, and Brandenburg is core SPD territory. The party has led every election there since 1990; in 1999 it even won an outright majority. Those days, alas, are long gone. Right now the SPD is polling at a mere 21.7% there. That may sound like a lot compared to its 7.3% showing in Saxony and its 6.1% showing in Thüringen, but historically it is a disaster, especially because it places it nearly seven percentage points behind Alternative für Deutschland.

Support for open borders policies is strangling the SPD in the east, and that much is clear even to our intensely dumb marshmallow Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD). We also know that within-EU border controls are possible. Since 2015, German police have run continuous controls on the Austrian border, and as of October 2023 they have implemented similar controls on the country’s borders with Czechia, Poland and Switzerland. This summer, these controls were briefly expanded to all German borders to limit the ingress of undesirables during the UEFA European Football Championship. Faeser, however, refused to extend these controls after the games ended, despite statistics showing their effectiveness. State media broadcasters even summoned somebody from the Federal Police Union to tell us that such checks “are not sustainable at this level of intensity”.

Pending electoral humiliation now seems to have altered the parameters of the sustainable. Universal border controls are back on the menu:

The coalition Government is tightening its asylum policy. Specifically, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) has ordered that people seeking protection who enter the country illegally be turned back at all German borders. Faeser said that these controls… should enable a “massive expansion of the refoulement” of refugees…

“We are strengthening internal security and continuing our tough course against irregular migration,” Faeser said… according to an announcement published by the Ministry of the Interior this afternoon. Until there is a new common European asylum system and stronger protection of the EU’s external borders, the stricter controls at national borders are necessary.

The new measure will enable the Federal Police to “deploy the full range of stationary and mobile border police measures at all German land borders,” Faeser said. The Federal Police will be strengthened with additional posts and resources.

Faeser emphasised that the previous controls with Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Austria had already enabled more than 30,000 rejections since October last year.

This is a campaign manoeuvre, and there is every reason to be cynical about it. Even the centre-Right CDU is cynical, above all because border controls in themselves are not enough. The Government must devise a means of comprehensively rejecting migrants, however much pleading they do about asylum, and Faeser has been studiously vague about her plans in this area. Nevertheless, her scrambling illustrates what an enormous albatross mass migrationist policies have become for the establishment parties. We are very far from anything like a solution to this crisis, but we have also come a long way from the religious open-borders insanity of 2015.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.