German election frontrunner could open door to cooperation with far right on migration

By Sarah Marsh and Andreas Rinke

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused his main rival in the federal elections next month of breaking a taboo by signaling his openness to pushing disputed measures on migration through parliament with the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate for the two allied conservative parties (CDU/CSU) who are leading polls ahead of the election on Feb. 23, has long ruled out forming a coalition with the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), deeming them too extreme.

He has, however, shifted the conservatives' stance on migration ever farther to the right in recent years so that it increasingly resembles the AfD's, in what analysts say is a bid to win back voters from the anti-immigration party.

Merz vowed on Thursday to close Germany's land borders to irregular migration if he becomes chancellor, a day after an Afghan asylum seeker was arrested for a deadly knife attack targeting children.

He also said he would be submitting motions to parliament on migration next week, including one to allow the federal police to request arrest warrants for people they apprehend who do not have the legal right to remain in Germany.

With Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens opposed to such moves, though, the conservatives would have to rely on the support of the AfD and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) to succeed.

"Next week, we will introduce motions in the German Bundestag that are exclusively in line with our convictions,” Merz said. “And we will introduce them regardless of who agrees with them.”

Merz specified that he remained convinced his party should not work with the AfD, saying that meant it would not form a coalition with it or negotiate motions with it.

But the CDU/CSU has in the past, like other mainstream parties, also sought to avoid putting forward motions at the national level that it knows could only pass with the AfD.

"Until now, I had the impression that we could rely on the opposition leader's statement that he would not work with the AfD even after the election," Scholz told the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

"Now that the CDU wants to push through its proposals in the Bundestag with votes from the AfD, I'm really worried," he added. "The firewall to the AfD must not crumble.”

DIVISIVE VOTE FOR CONSERVATIVES?

The conservatives have in the past only passed measures with the AfD at regional and local level.

In 2020, the failure of former CDU chancellor candidate Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to prevent CDU-AfD cooperation in Thuringia state was a key contribution to the pressure that forced her to abandon her ambitions for the chancellorship.

Philipp Koeker, political scientist at the University of Hanover, said Merz's gambit was likely to backfire, irrespective of the outcome, "not only because he must now explain why he indirectly cooperated with the AfD ... but also because the vote could reveal divisions within his own party".

Parliamentary insiders say the conservatives could seek an immediate parliamentary vote, which would require a two-thirds approval they would unlikely be able to achieve - allowing them to sound tough without actually breaking the firewall.

AfD leader Alice Weidel on Thursday offered to work with Merz to push his proposals through.

"The firewall has fallen," she wrote in a post on social media platform X on Friday.

(Reporting by Sarah Marsh, Andreas Rinke, Rachel More, Friederike Heine, Alexander Ratz, Holger Hansen and Riham Alkosuaa in Berlin; editing by Mark Heinrich and Sharon Singleton)