Because the AfD doesn’t have the necessary numbers to change laws, most of its efforts in the Bundestag have been designed to nudge conversation instead. Ever since the election, discussion of events in the public eye has had to include the AfD’s spin. When Deniz Yücel, a German-Turkish journalist, was released after a year in jail on false charges of espionage, AfD members declared him a “hater of Germany” and called for him to renounce his German citizenship. (A day earlier, André Poggenburg, an AfD leader in the state of Saxony Anhalt, attacked the entire Turkish community in Germany, which currently stands at some three million people. They were all “cameldrivers” who should be “sent back to the Bosphorus,” he said.) In recent months, the AfD has introduced legislation to make German the country’s “national language” and to alter the laws governing dual citizenship. These proposals have little legislative weight but a strong pull on the media.
For people working with minority groups in Germany, the AfD’s presence in the Bundestag poses an additional problem. Now that these anti-immigrant views are being expressed by a parliamentary party, not individuals, members of government cannot criticize them as racist—by law, ministers are required to be neutral in their treatment of political parties. Last month, the German constitutional court judged that an education minister had acted unconstitutionally when she called for a “red card” boycott of the AfD over its anti-refugee politics three years ago. AfD politicians had brought the complaint. [...]
On the issue of immigration, however, there is a clear shift in tone. The 2013 coalition agreement had talked about Germany as a “cosmopolitan country” that saw “immigration as an opportunity.” The picture presented in the most recent agreement is much darker: “We’re continuing our efforts to mitigate migration to Germany and Europe appropriate with regard to the ability of society to integrate, so that a situation like 2015 is not repeated,” referring to the nearly two million immigrants who arrived in Germany that year, many of them asylum-seekers from Syria. For the first time, a cap has been set for the number of asylum-seekers who can come to Germany: 180,000-200,000 a year. And while the Social Democrats can claim, as immigration expert Astrid Ziebarth explained to me, that the path remains open—that these are simply guidelines, not a hard and fast rule—the overwhelming impression conveyed by the current policy is a denial of the number of immigrants already in Germany and a misrepresentation of how many newcomers the country would need to welcome in order to maintain the current workforce (400,000 a year, according to one estimate). The name of the Interior Ministry has been changed: it is now the Ministry of the Interior, Development and Heimat—a somewhat uncritical choice of words for a country that claims to prize historical awareness.
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