Prospective chancellor Friedrich Merz’s pre-election rhetoric on border control continues to crumble, following the arrival of a flight of 155 Afghan migrants, the first since the vote, which landed in Berlin on Tuesday, February 25th.
Two flights from Islamabad were cancelled before the national poll—officially due to logistical problems. Yet it is clear that the mass transit of migrants is again well underway, with this latest transfer scheduled to be followed by another at the beginning of March.
Germany has accepted almost 50,000 Afghan migrants since the country fell to the Taliban in August 2021, just three and a half years ago.
The financial cost to the taxpayer has been great, with an arguably greater social cost. Susanne Schröter, a specialist on Islam, responded to this latest flight by warning that Afghan migrants
are disproportionately involved in violent and sexual crimes and … have mostly been socialized in Islamist ways.
Merz, who is likely to be the next chancellor, has attempted to distance himself from the arrivals. One official from his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party said it was a “remarkable impudence” on the part of the federal government to “stop the flights in a media-effective manner” before the election, only to allow them to take place again after the vote.
The CDU’s Thorsten Frei also told Bild that “the Foreign Office, which is run by the Greens, is apparently caught up in contradictions when it comes to the issue of Afghanistan.”
On the one hand, NGOs are able to bring Afghans to Germany through the voluntary admission program, and on the other hand, it should not be possible to bring Afghans who have committed crimes back to their homeland.
Yet Dirk Wiese, who is parliamentary group vice-chair for the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—with which the CDU is likely to form a coalition, defended the resumption of flights. He said that many of the migrants “worked for our troops in Afghanistan,” adding that “abandoning these local staff is the wrong approach.”
It is not difficult to imagine Merz maintaining high Afghan arrival numbers, regardless of his reported frustration, given that he also this week U-turned on an election pledge, less than 24 hours after the federal election.
With this in mind, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) politician Rainer Balzer argued that only a coalition with his party “will bring about the urgently needed change in policy.”
