Germany Took Nine Years to Transform from a Boat State to a Fortress State

Around this time nine years ago, Germany, through the political will of Chancellor Angela Merkel, became as open as a boat state. By saying ‘Welcome!’ to waves of migrants from Islamic countries, which were massively sent by Turkish President Erdoğan, and assuring its citizens that ‘we can do this’, Germany effectively abolished its borders and opened its doors wide to anyone who declared themselves a refugee (from Syria) without any obstacles, checks, or criteria. It called on other European countries to do the same and accused anyone warning of the long-term destabilizing and security-threatening consequences of such a migration policy of xenophobia.

These days, Germany is transforming into a fortress state. Since Tuesday, September 16, the ruling left-liberal-green coalition, known as the traffic light coalition, which had been even more open and welcoming towards migrants than Chancellor Merkel, has unilaterally introduced strict controls at all German state (Schengen) borders, where border police will ‘scan’ all foreign nationals who are potential asylum seekers upon entry and decide on the spot whether they have the right to asylum. If they do not have that right, which they will not, they will be immediately returned to the neighboring country from which they came.

Direct Motive for the Shift

According to SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, these measures will be applied for the next six months, with a possible extension, until appropriate oversight of the external European borders and the implementation of a common European asylum system is ensured. This means that this measure will last a very long time. The opposition CDU has proposed even stricter measures: that Germany should not accept any new asylum seekers until further notice. Presenting the new measures, which include rapid deportations of those whose asylum applications have been rejected, the minister stated that this would be protection against acute dangers of Islamic terrorism and serious crimes. Such a statement has not been heard from a German mainstream politician who wanted to remain mainstream until now. In short, Germany has dramatically announced the end of its previous policy towards illegal migrants and has begun to call things by their proper names.

There is a direct motive for such a political shift at this moment. Provincial parliamentary elections are being held in Brandenburg, which surrounds the capital Berlin, on Sunday. According to pre-election polls, the far-right AfD is leading (28.1%), with a trend of further growth; the electoral surprise on the rise is the new far-left list of Sahra Wagenknecht BSW, a revitalized version of the neo-communist party Die Linke; the Greens have completely sunk (5.2%), while the SPD (21.6%) and CDU (16.7%) are losing ground.

It is evident that we are facing a scenario similar to those that have already occurred in Saxony and Thuringia: that far-right and far-left parties begin to dominate the political mainstream. This trend becomes more serious considering that both the AfD and the far-left parties (BSW, Die Linke) are distinctly pro-Russian in orientation, significantly influenced by Vladimir Putin, and that Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg are provinces along Germany’s eastern border with Poland. Since both the far-right and far-left have largely grown on the criticism of the borderless and criterion-free pro-migrant policy pursued by centrist German governments since 2015, the decision of Scholz’s government to close Germany’s borders and announce the end of the previous pro-migrant policy can also be viewed as a desperate attempt to at least mitigate the Thuringian scenario in the upcoming elections in Brandenburg.

Stopping Further Radicalization

Germany will certainly remain a fortress state until the federal parliamentary elections next autumn, attempting to stop the further radicalization of its political scene and the geopolitically dangerous rise of pro-Russian parties from both the far-right and far-left spectrum. If you have a slightly darker complexion and also have a mustache, you will be scanned even at those borders that you previously crossed as if they did not exist, such as the German border with Belgium or France.

For Croatia, as a country on the migration route, the new German policy always carries the latent danger of becoming a temporary camp for rejected asylum seekers due to chain returns of migrants. It is also certain that the German shift in migration policy will become a European trend. But now it is much more difficult to remedy the political, social, and security consequences than it was nine years ago to introduce oversight and criteria in migration processes.