Germany and the Refugee Crisis

Roland Benedikter and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski explore the ambiguous future of Germany’s refugee crisis.

The refugee and migrant crisis has been one of the most important and most divisive political issues in recent German history. It is first restructuring Germany’s political and economic landscape; second impacting the build-up of post-Brexit Europe; and third changing both Germany’s and Europe’s relationship with other parts of the world. Overall, the refugee and migrant crisis is a phase of transition of the European unification project characterised by deep economic and political ambivalences particularly in its remaining post-Brexit lead nation Germany.

In 2015, more than 1,300,000 refugees and migrants came to Germany, Hungary, Austria, France and Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Beforehand, the Southern periphery EU member states with the most central access to the Mediterranean—Italy and Greece—were the most affected ones with other EU member states largely ignoring the problem. But given the “welcome policy” of chancellor Angela Merkel, the effects are particularly profound in Continental Europe’s remaining lead nation, Germany.

Since September 2015 at least 890,000 refugees have arrived in Germany alone, as the country opened its borders to refugees stuck in Hungary since September 2015. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel declared at the end of August 2015 that there are no limits to the number of refugees Germany can accept coining her famous phrase “we can do it” or “we can cope”.

By doing so, Germany de facto suspended unilaterally part of the EU law, mainly the Dublin conventions regulating that the first EU country in which refugees enter is responsible for the processing of their asylum claims. Second, with this Merkel to some extent decided unilaterally about the EU immigration and refugee policy since by “inviting” large numbers of migrants and refugees to travel “now or never” without consultations among the EU-28, she put considerable burdens on other EU nations such as Italy and Greece given that most migrants from the African continent cannot reach Germany directly, but have to enter the EU through Italy and Greece. Merkel’s “invitation politics” without doubt also influenced the Brexit vote of 23 June 2016.

Some German and European politicians declared Merkel’s “we can handle this” policy to be a great humanitarian gesture. Others saw it as an enlightened political choice serving German interests, given the German labour force shortages, historically low unemployment (6.4% which is the lowest since 1991), historically low interest rates (in the Q2 of 2016 it was 0.08 %) and rising tax revenues.

However, there has also been a growing criticism of the German government, both in Germany and other EU countries. In Germany, the decision to accept more than 1 million Muslim refugees in 2015 and 2016 raised serious concerns about Germany’s cultural preparedness for such step. Already in 2006 the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung (a political foundation close to the German Social Democratic Party) published a report claiming that right-wing extremism is neither a problem at the margins of the German society nor is it mainly a phenomenon of Eastern Germany, since it can be found in the very middle of the German society.

More recent political developments seem to confirm the findings, as the Federal Criminal Police Office counted more than 1000 violent attacks on asylum seeker homes in Germany in 2015. An anti-migration party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany), rose to new levels of popularity, winning seats both in Eastern German and Western German regional parliaments in 2016. With 24.3 percent, the AfD in March 2016 became the second strongest party in the regional parliament of Sachsen-Anhalt, only after the CDU winning 29.8 percent; and with 20.8 percent it replicated the success in September 2016 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the political homeland of chancellor Angela Merkel, as second placed only after the SPD which got 30.6 percent, reducing the chancellor’s party CDU to a meager 19 percent. In the September 18, 2016 elections for the capital Berlin’s parliament, the AfD in its first bid immediately jumped to 14 percent and became the big winner, while the CDU lost more than 5 percent and thus achieved its worst result ever since the end of WWII with 18 percent. Further, the Social Democratic party (SPD), which has governed the city in an alliance with the CDU over the past five years, also lost 5 percent and ended up with 22 percent. It is likely that the AfD whose leading politicians openly espouse anti-migrant and partly racist positions will reach more than 10% in the German Federal parliamentary elections in 2017.

In this way, the refugee and migrant crisis is in the process of changing the German political landscape. In her self-critique following the series of defeats on 19 September, CDU chancellor Angela Merkel admitted “errors” with regard to the refugee policy and stated she would not use the slogan “We can handle this” any longer since it had become “an empty formula”. At the same time, she insisted on her course.

The German government has been at great pains to put a positive spin on “Europe’s broken borders”, and more in general on the refugee and migrant influx into Germany by highlighting economic advantages for the German society. Many of the optimistic arguments of the government are based on the analysis conducted by the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin (DIW). A DIW analysis conducted in 2015 claims that refugees and migrants coming to Germany will be a long-term economic investment. The analysis makes a number of assumptions such as the continuing but decreasing influx of refugees until 2020, a very high number of refugees in the working age and growing productivity of refugees. Based on these assumptions it offers an optimistic prediction about a general boost to the German economy as well as an improved income level for people already living in Germany within a couple of years.

The main thrust of the argument is a Keynesian one: increased economic demand (based both on private consumption and the consumption of the state) will not only balance the initial costs incurred by the German state quite soon but will also benefit the entire German economy, considerably increasing the GDP per capita. In a sense, the expenditures on the refugees (new public administration personnel, additional teachers of the German language, construction of new asylum seeker homes as well as direct payments to the refugees—annually on average 12,000 Euro per refugee) amount to a huge stimulus package.

However, according to a survey analysis conducted by Jürgen Schupp in 2016 only 28 percent of the respondents in Germany are in favour of migrants and refugees being accepted without number and time limits, while a majority of the German society agrees to their stay only as a temporary mechanism for humanitarian reasons, rather than economic investment. At the same time more than 50% of Germans see more risks than opportunities in the massive influx of migrants and refugees.

As a consequence, a political backlash against the current refugee policy is underway which could not only lead to further decrease in popularity with the current government but threaten the entire political system of Germany, boosting further popularity with the AfD and possibly placing it as the second largest party in the political spectrum, while declassifying the SPD already balancing at 20% support, and the CDU despite its “chancellor bonus” at around 30%.

In a poll carried out by the independent German research institute TNS in cooperation with the renowned leftist weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” of September 2016, a vast majority of Germans rejected the course of chancellor Angela Merkel and asked for urgent corrections. 82 percent of the more than 1000 interviewees wanted a clear change in the “asylum politics”, as “Der Spiegel” reported on September 9, 2016. Of them, 28 percent were of the opinion that Merkel had to change her politics “in principle and from the bottom up”, 54 percent wanted an at least partial change. Only 15 percent wanted the chancellor to continue with her current “asylum policy”.

Moreover, many German intellectuals such as, for example, the highly respected liberal-conservative political and social philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (born 1947), criticise the lack of a sound and coherent vision on all sides of the political spectrum of the leading EU nation and consider in particular Merkel’s policy as a “trend to cultural and political suicide to which no one can be obligated – since there is no moral duty to self-destruction”. Others see Merkel’s relatively lonesome decisions in the migration and refugee question as something not carefully thought through, but rather as a semi-instinctive choice due to the effect of a particular mixture of Merkel’s Communist education during her youth in the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, and her personal biographic roots in pietistic Christianity as the daughter of the Lutheran theologian Horst Kasner (1926-2011). Religion played a key role in Merkel’s family history, and so did social democracy since her mother Herlind Jentzsch was a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Given these economic and political ambivalences, the perspective remains disputed. Despite the closure of the “Balkan route”, the refugee crisis is far from over yet for Germany. Its economic advantages are uncertain, since they can become a boost to economic growth only in the long term but there is also a serious risk of creating a new class of economically underprivileged, poorly educated and unemployed people without proper institutional solutions which may not find much consensus among the voters. Second, the refugee and migrant topic presents political ambiguities that are both of concern to Germany and the European Union.

If Angela Merkel was serious in stating at the final press conference of the recent post-Brexit Bratislava “EU restart summit” on 16 September 2016 “that we must jointly agree on an agenda, that we must have a working plan to be able to handle the respective issues,” there may be hardly another way than to correct one-sided positions and to eventually shift policies from idealistic – i.e. driven by the remembrance of the German history of the first half of the 20th century – to pragmatic and realpolitik.

Roland Benedikter (Corresponding author), Dott. Dr. Dr. Dr., is Research Professor of Multidisciplinary Political Analysis at the Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies of the University of Wroclaw/Breslau, Research Affiliate of Stanford University, Senior Research Fellow of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington D.C., Trustee of the Toynbee Prize Foundation Boston and Full member of the Club of Rome. Contact: rolandbenedikter@yahoo.de.

Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski, Dr., holds the Chair of Political Science at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is also adjunct professor of Political Science at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Contact: karole@uni-potsdam.de.

Photo credit: Jan Michael Ihl via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA