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The German parliament has rejected a bill to tighten immigration controls brought by the frontrunner to be the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with the backing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.
It came after a similar but non-binding motion was passed by parliament on Wednesday with the votes of the AfD, prompting a wave of protest from those who said it was a breach in Germany’s longstanding “firewall” between the far right and the mainstream.
The bill was rejected by 350 to 338, out of 693 MPs who voted, including five abstentions.
Wednesday’s motion was the first time in Germany’s postwar history that a parliamentary majority was reached with the help of the far right, greatly heightening tensions ahead of Friday’s debate. Opponents included members of Merz’s own CDU/CSU alliance who rebelled as well as members of the pro-business Free Democratic party (FDP) who had voted for the original motion but wanted the law to return to internal committees for further debate.
The “influx limitation law”, both the name and detail of which has been criticised, was considered of such historic importance that the plenary hall was unusually full and some MPs were reportedly persuaded to leave their sickbeds to be present.
Merz, who will lead the Christian Democratic Union into the 23 February elections, said his bill was necessary for German domestic security and denied he was working with the AfD, or had any intention of doing so.
“There are many who are concerned about democracy, but there are also many who are concerned about security and order in this country and expect decisions to be made,” he said.
The debate adjourned before it had even begun in order for behind-the-scenes negotiations that aimed to enable the law’s passage with the backing of mainstream parties and not the far right.
Attempts by the Social Democrats (SPD), their coalition partner the Greens, as well as their former coalition partner the FDP, to stop the law’s passage by referring it back to committees earlier in the day were unsuccessful.
When MPs returned to the plenary hall it was for what was an often rowdy, tension-filled and emotional debate.
Much was made of the opposition to the proceedings, including the decision by a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor, Albrecht Weinberg, to return to the German state his order of merit over the Wednesday vote, as well as the resignation from the CDU of Michel Friedman, a prominent German-French publicist and former deputy chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Merz said the law was necessary in response to a string of high-profile murders carried out by men with an immigrant background. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, had said existing laws were sufficient to stop such attacks, if properly implemented.
Between 66% and 67% of Germans are in favour of permanent controls on Germany’s borders, according to recent polls, including 56% of supporters of the Social Democrats.
Parallels have been drawn after this week’s dramatic scenes in parliament – during which Merz, the conservative opposition leader, was accused of courting the far right – with the events that led up to the Nazi party taking power through the political process amid a lack of unity among mainstream parties.
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Rolf Mützenich, the chair of the SPD parliamentary group, said: “Weimar failed because of the lack of unity in democracy. But Weimar also failed because the authoritarian mindset never completely disappeared.”
He had urged Merz to reverse his decision and “re-establish the firewall” against cooperating with the AfD. He suggested that if Merz failed to do so he would have to live with a damaged political reputation.
“Your fall from grace will always accompany you,” Mützenich said, to jeers from the CDU benches. “But we can still close the gateway to hell together.”
In an extraordinary broadside against his erstwhile CDU rival Angela Merkel, who on Thursday criticised Merz for his apparent U-turn over earlier refusals to work with the AfD, Merz said his own party had a “significant share of responsibility” for the fact that the AfD had sat in the Bundestag since 2017.
The remarks were a reference to Merkel’s open door policy during which almost 1 million people entered Germany in 2015, but Merz went on to say it was the fault of the three-way coalition under Scholz that the party had since been able to become “twice as strong”.
The foreign ministe, Annalena Baerbock of the Greens, had urged Merz to change his mind and drop the bill. “It’s not about yourself, it’s about Germany,” she said. “There are times when you have to correct your policy by 180 degrees. That is precisely the question now. Do the right thing.”
The first opinion poll on Friday since the Wednesday vote showed the AfD’s position unchanged in advance of the election. It is now second in the polls with 22%. Merz’s CDU/CSU was down one percentage point to 29%, while the SPD of Olaf Scholz gained 1.5 percentage points, bringing it to 17%, its best showing since the end of December. The Greens gained half a percentage point.
Protests have taken place across Germany over the perceived shift to the right of the German parliament. At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Thursday evening, a line of young people held up a long string of illuminated letters spelling out the slogan “Hope and Resistance”. On a poster bearing the CDU’s name, the word brandmauer (firewall) had been crossed out and replaced with the word brandstifter (arsonist).
