For anyone who has followed German politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, watching Germany’s current coalition government embrace populist talking points and policy priorities over the past few weeks in response to another fraught debate about migration has elicited an eerie sense of déjà vu. This sudden pivot is partly a product of desperation among Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, and the opposition center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, in response to recent electoral gains made by the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in eastern Germany.
Yet Scholz’s decision to deploy border patrols to all of Germany’s frontiers this week in response to a knife attack in the town of Solingen by a Syrian asylum-seeker on Aug. 27—as well as the CDU’s strident calls to put the measure in place—also symbolized how both parties are still in thrall to flawed policy responses toward migration that have repeatedly ended in failure over the past 30 years.
The move by the SPD-led coalition government—which includes the market-friendly Free Democratic Party, or FDP, and the left-leaning Greens—expanded already existing patrols that run contrary to the spirit and possibly the letter of treaties such as the Schengen Agreement, which were designed to remove barriers to the movement of goods and people between European Union member states. Yet rather than marking a radical departure from previous policies, these checks are simply the latest iteration in a long line of security measures that German governments have introduced over the past three decades in response to frustration among some voters over migration, as well as anxiety over electoral gains by the populist far right. While the challenge posed by the AfD has risen in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis, support for its far-right predecessors in regional elections as well as anti-migrant street violence involving neo-Nazi thugs helped fuel similar tough-sounding yet ultimately ineffectual government responses toward previous waves of migration that reshaped German society in the 1990s and 2000s.