With the conservative, anti-globalist AfD party hot on its heels and threatening to surpass it in the polls, the liberal-establishment CDU in the past days has signaled a clear rightward shift. The party last week replaced its secretary-general with a figure from its migration-critical wing, while this week, two of its key leaders have backed a proposal to take a hard line on certain asylum seekers.
The proposal, put forward in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Op-Ed titled “Our right to asylum is based on a lie” by Thorsten Frei, the deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction in the Bundestag, calls for Germany to abolish the right to asylum in its present form. Frei’s asylum initiative, seen by left-liberals as radical and controversial, has garnered support from CDU chief Friedrich Merz, Der Spiegel reports.
More specifically, Frei argues that the most effective way to stop the continuous stream of migrants flowing into the European Union is to simply abolish the right of individuals to apply for asylum within the bloc and establish a quota system for taking in genuine refugees directly from war-torn countries.
Frei suggests the 27-member bloc take in some 300,000-400,000 refugees per year from abroad and then distribute them throughout the union’s member states. He slammed the bloc’s current Darwinian model, where only the fittest—namely fighting-age men with the physical strength to make the treacherous journey—are rewarded with the right to apply for asylum.
Frei writes:
The way our asylum law is designed is not aimed at the weakest, but makes a deeply inhumane choice: those who are too old, too weak, too poor, or too ill have no chance. He or she cannot make his way through the deserts of Africa and across the Mediterranean. Women and children are thus often de facto excluded from our “human” rights.
The current asylum system not only punishes the physically weaker, would-be asylum seekers but also those living in the societies that receive the masses of young men from alien cultures.
Continuing, Frei writes:
[The current asylum system] has also turned out to be highly problematic for the societies of the receiving countries. According to the overwhelming opinion of the population, even in the Scandinavian countries, the load limit has been exceeded in recent years. Security risks and integration problems are associated with uncontrolled migration. In addition, in Europe, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between those in need of protection and economic migrants.
Commenting on his colleague’s proposal during the retreat of the CSU state group in Andechs Monastery in Upper Bavaria, CDU leader Friedrich Merz called it an “important and good contribution to solving a problem that we have been seeing for years and where there are currently no really good and convincing solutions.”
Asked whether he had been aware of his colleague’s proposal prior to it being published in the newspaper, Merz said: “Assume that when leading members of our parliamentary group publish articles in their names, I know about it beforehand.”
With its apparent rightward shift, the CDU is without a doubt hoping to persuade the increasingly large segments of German society who have thrown their support behind the AfD to consider the CDU a viable alternative once again.
