Germany’s Scholz breaks bad on migration

4 months ago 2

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BERLIN — It was the kind of law-and-order talk that has been swelling far-right rallies from Palermo to Potsdam.

“It outrages me when someone who has found protection here commits the most serious of crimes,” a balding 65-year-old told his audience, adding to applause that violent migrants “had no business” in Germany. “Such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria or Afghanistan.”

The strange thing was, this cri de cœur emanated not from a beerhall gathering of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), but from the rostrum of Berlin’s Reichstag. Even more perplexing: The man who spoke the words has not only spent years defending Germany’s open-door migration policies, but was also largely responsible for them.

Meet the new Olaf Scholz.

Public outrage over a wave of high-profile killings and other violent attacks that authorities have blamed on foreign perpetrators is forcing Germany’s chancellor to take a tougher line on migration — at least rhetorically.

With public support for Scholz’s three-party coalition plumbing new lows, the chancellor is attempting to address his greatest vulnerability: public dissatisfaction over a sharp rise in the number of arriving asylum seekers, coupled with an increase in crime that authorities are attributing to high levels of migration.

In a sign of his government’s growing panic over the issue, Scholz’s Cabinet last week endorsed a draft bill that would allow for the deportation of foreigners who praise acts of terror and other violence, even if they only do so on social media.

That proposal — like Scholz’s Bundestag speech — was a reaction to the grisly killing of a police officer by an Afghan suspect, a crime that shocked the nation right before last month’s European election. Following the attack some radical Islamists praised the killing online, further fueling national outrage.

And yet, as with the promise to deport Syrians and Afghans who have committed crimes, the government’s plan is more about optics than substantive impact. It amounts to a desperate — and likely futile — effort to counter the rise of the AfD, whose politicians have seized on the issue, frequently depicting Germany as being overrun by violent crime.

The depth of Scholz’s weakness on the issue became clear in the wake of last month’s European election, in which the AfD scored its best-ever result in a national election while Scholz’s Social Democrats suffered their worst.

Another reminder of the resonance of migration with voters — not that Scholz needed one — came with Sunday’s victory of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in the first round of parliamentary elections in France.

Germans fret over a rise in crime

Germany remains one of the safest countries in the world. When it comes to security, however, perception is reality, and in a broad survey following last month’s European election, personal safety was top of most voters’ minds, with 74 percent saying they were “very worried” about a “massive” increase in crime in the future.

A recent spate of attacks hasn’t helped. Last week began with news that a 20-year-old German man, who was accompanying his sister after her high school graduation ball in the northwest of the country, had been bludgeoned to death, allegedly by an 18-year-old Syrian.

A couple of days later, a Syrian man wielding a machete triggered a melee in a small town in the southwestern state of Saarland. Then, on Thursday, a 24-year-old Somali allegedly stabbed another man in front of a Hamburg bar, critically injuring the victim.

While such violence is not particularly surprising in a country of 83 million, government statistics do show a correlation between high levels of migration and a rise in crime.

“We’re pushing the boundaries of our capacity for integration,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said recently.

The number of criminal acts in Germany rose by about 6 percent last year compared to 2022, with authorities attributing the increase to high levels of migration. While foreigners make up about 15 percent of Germany’s population, they accounted for a record 41 percent of all crimes in 2023. Crime that authorities attributed to foreign suspects rose by 23 percent in 2022 and by 18 percent in 2023, according to government statistics.

“Germany has become less secure over the past two years and that’s because of the rise in crime by foreigners,” said Andrea Lindholz, a Christian Democratic lawmaker, in a recent parliamentary debate.

Much of the recent attention in the German press has focused on a sharp increase in stabbings. The number of violent incidents involving a knife rose by nearly 40 percent from 2021 to 2023, hitting 14,000.

Many Germans were shocked when radical Islamists celebrated the stabbing of the police officer in online posts, leading Berlin to vow to deport those who praise acts of terror and violence.

“Islamist agitators stuck in the stone age do not belong in our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said last week.

It’s far from clear that the deportation bill will make it through parliament given concerns among Germany’s Greens that the reform is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.

Even if parliament does approve the draft bill, the tougher legislation is unlikely to curb Islamist hate speech online.

For one thing, the country’s most prominent Islamists aren’t migrants but German citizens who can’t be deported. What’s more, migrants who have been granted asylum are protected from deportation.

That means the only people who could be deported are those with standard visas. Yet even they could only be sent home if they come from countries that Germany has deemed safe; Syria and Afghanistan aren’t on the list.

Such complications partly explain why Scholz, after pledging last fall to begin deporting people “on a grand scale,” hasn’t kept that promise. Although the number of deportations rose 30 percent in the first quarter of this year, the total was still only 4,700. At that rate, Germany would need over two years just to clear the backlog of people slated for swift repatriation.

There are currently about 230,000 people in Germany eligible for extradition. The government has granted most of them a status known as Duldung — “tolerated”— given the impossibility of sending them back to their home countries.

Of the 230,000 Duldung foreigners, about 45,000 are slated for immediate extradition. Only 6 percent of the latter group come from Afghanistan and Syria.

In an effort to show the government is taking the issue seriously, Scholz has been trying to cut deals with third countries, such as Uzbekistan, to allow it to deport more migrants.

But that effort has drawn skepticism from German constitutional experts, including a former high-court judge, who question its legality. It is now clear that any move by the government to push through such extraditions would be met with legal challenges that would delay the initiative or scupper it altogether.

Scholz’s willingness to take such risks suggests he understands that the German public has turned against his migration policies. With just a year until the next federal election, however, he may not have enough time to do anything about it.

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