Immigration Backlash Erodes Merkel’s Power in Conservative Stronghold

A Bavarian uprising within German leader’s coalition could topple the government if EU summit fails to ease refugee crisis

By Bojan Pancevski, WSJ

DORFEN, Germany—When Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to thousands of asylum seekers in the late summer of 2015, people in the southernmost state of Bavaria rushed to help in such numbers that authorities had to briefly turn back offers of clothing and food.

Today, after the thousands became more than a million and as immigration redraws Europe’s political landscape, Bavaria has become the springboard for an insurgency that is threatening the German chancellor’s job.

Ms. Merkel is under fire from her conservative allies in Bavaria, who are part of her government and control the Interior Ministry in Berlin. They have given the chancellor until this weekend to strike an unlikely European deal that puts a lid on immigration or closes the border to certain immigrants. Failure could bring about a collapse of her fragile coalition.

It is a remarkable setback for Ms. Merkel, a politician once viewed by many in Europe as the continent’s anchor of stability and a leader of the liberal West. At an informal meeting last Sunday, Ms. Merkel failed to persuade her EU counterparts to take back immigrants who had made their way to Germany after already applying for asylum elsewhere. Now she is left with one last chance to extract an agreement at an EU summit on June 28 and 29.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union parliamentary group Volker Kauder attend a meeting Tuesday in Berlin. Photo: omer messinger/EPA/Shutterstock

The domestic rebellion, launched two weeks ago by Horst Seehofer, interior minister and chairman of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Ms. Merkel’s larger Christian Democratic Union, came as a shock in Berlin, but it had been brewing for months in Germany’s affluent and traditionalist southern state.

Fueled by discontent over Ms. Merkel’s liberal policies, the antiestablishment Alternative for Germany, or AfD has been making inroads into CSU heartlands, raising the political temperature and forcing the conservatives to tilt to the right. The arrival of over 1.4 million asylum seekers in Germany since 2015 has stoked fears of a swift demographic change, coupled with anxiety over reports of rising migrant crime and revolt over the huge costs of managing the crisis which has been estimated to over €20 billion a year.

Three years on, many of the migrants still live in temporary housing scattered across the country, affecting communities even in remote rural areas. Larger cities have seen the demographic mix in some neighborhoods change almost beyond recognition.

Most of the newcomers have been unable to enter the highly regulated job market, mainly for lack of language and other skills required in one of the world’s most advanced economies.

These tensions were on full display last week in this picture-perfect Bavarian town of 15,000, where African and Middle Eastern migrants can be seen loitering around the railway station and in parks, out of work and often struggling to get a place in German courses.

The AfD had hired the Dorfen Inn, a beer hall facing onto the medieval marketplace, for an evening of discussions about ending Ms. Merkel’s liberal refugee policy. With both critics and supporters of the chancellor in attendance, the communal tables dotted with beer jugs and schnitzel plates soon turned into a microcosm of the debates that are tearing at the country’s political fabric.

“I think we need to change the current immigration policy and quick,” said Reinhold Mayer, a retired aircraft engineer and longstanding CSU supporter who said he was considering switching to the AfD. Ms. Merkel’s policies, he said, had been the biggest factor in the rise of far-right populism from Eastern Europe to Austria and Italy.

Jakob Niemeyer, a 31-year-old carpenter from a neighboring village, disagreed loudly. “The AfD is a fascist party,” he thundered, “and we will not tolerate fascism here.”

Such scenes have been playing across Bavaria for months. And as an October election in the state approaches, they have been causing alarm in Munich, the ornate capital of a state the CSU has been ruling almost uninterruptedly since the end of World War II.

Opinion polls show the AfD is set to rob the CSU of its absolute majority at the poll and become its first viable right-wing challenger in postwar history.

Horst Seehofer, chairman of the Christian Social Union, in Munich on June 18. Photo: Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto/ZUMA PRESS

With the CSU growing restless and defensive, it just needed a spark for the simmering dispute among German conservatives over immigration to catch fire. That spark came two weeks ago, when Ms. Merkel abruptly vetoed a 63-point plan by Mr. Seehofer designed to broadcast a tightening of immigration law to his home base in the south.

After days of backstage negotiations failed to achieve a compromise, Mr. Seehofer said he would give the chancellor a fortnight to clinch a European deal to end the flow of newcomers into the continent. Should she fail, he would implement his plan, which Ms. Merkel said she would treat as insubordination.

Since ousting the CSU would end the government’s parliamentary majority, a clash would almost certainly mean the collapse of Ms. Merkel’s fourth government just 100 days after it started.

Back in Dorfen, Martin Sichert is the walking embodiment of Mr. Seehofer’s worst fears. A longstanding CSU supporter, he has now become the AfD’s leader in Bavaria.

Mr. Sichert reaped thunderous applause from the beer-hall audience when he told them his party rejected multiculturalism because the success of a country depended on the mentality of its people, something he wanted to preserve from migrant influence.

“People here stand at a red light even when there are no cars around,” Mr. Sichert told supporters. “It is this mentality that provides for top quality in manufacturing and governance.”

In an interview, Mr. Sichert said that he had always voted conservative, until Ms. Merkel made it impossible for him to support her policies. “More and more people feel the same. The AfD was born out of the CSU, because CSU ceased to be the party of the people,” Mr. Sichert said.

Many in the top echelons of the CSU—and in some quarters of Ms. Merkel’s CDU—share his analysis.

Officials of the Alternative for Germany party at an Ash Wednesday event, including, from right, federal spokesman Joerg Meuthen; Bavaria state chairman Martin Sichert; and state deputy chairwoman Katrin Ebner-Steiner. Photo: Armin Weigel/DPA/Zuma Press

One of those mainstream conservatives who fear too generous an immigration policy is feeding extremist ideas is Edmund Stoiber, a former state premier of Bavaria and one-time CDU-CSU candidate for chancellor.

The conflict over immigration in Europe, he said, “is the biggest challenge to liberal democracies and radical forces are swelling because voters have lost faith in traditional politicians.”

Mr. Stoiber cited the rise of populist movements in countries affected by mass migration, including Italy, where a populist coalition has taken power, and Sweden, where a far-right party rooted in neo-Nazism, the Sweden Democrats, could win a majority at the September elections.

“We are at a crossroads,” he said. “Merkel’s 2015 decision has caused a deep division in Europe and a realignment of the political landscape in many European countries…Seehofer wants to improve the control of migration to restore faith in politics and trust in the legal system. For us at the CSU it is shocking that the chancellor has turned this into such a confrontation.”

Police statistics for 2017 showed crime had fallen in Germany since the peak of the refugee crisis, but that refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants, who represent about 2% of the population, accounted for 14.2% of perpetrators. Reports about isolated offenses by migrants ranging from rape to murder to aborted and successful terror plots have become a daily staple of the tabloid press, contributing to a hardening of opinions about migrants.

By the end of 2017, a full three years after the peak of the refugee crisis, some 84% of the 700,000 Syrians currently in Germany were living on benefits, according to recent statistics by the Federal Labor Agency. More than a quarter of the six million recipients of the basic form of income support—which comprises free rent, heating, legal representation and a monthly cash allowance for food and other essentials—were non-EU migrants.

An AfD women’s march in Berlin earlier this month. Photo: Eric Cortes/NurPhoto/ZUMA PRESS

A Kantar Public poll published June 23 showed that 61% of Germans supported CSU’s proposal to tighten the border regime and 57% wanted to slow down immigration because they were worried about integration.

The CSU and CDU have been political Siamese twins for most of the postwar years, contesting national elections as one party and sharing a parliamentary group. But the bitter row over Ms. Merkel’s migration policy is sapping their ability to run the country at a time of global turbulence, and stretching their union to a breaking point.

Founded in the aftermath of World War II, the CSU had among its guiding principles the fact that it would never let a rival party emerge on its right. In a state that long ago turned from agricultural backwater to industrial powerhouse, home to such global conglomerates as BMW AG and Siemens AG , it sees itself both as robustly conservative and a guarantor of freedom and the rule of law.

While the chancellor has gradually tightened the rules governing immigration over the past three years, she has clung to the principle that no one seeking protection in Germany should be denied a fair hearing.

In Deggendorf, near Munich, where the AfD got a fifth of the votes at last September’s federal election—more than six points above its national score—this principle shapes day-to-day life.

An asylum center there hosts hundreds of recent arrivals, many from Africa, often with no identification papers. Few stand a chance of gaining asylum in Germany because they are typically judged to be economic migrants rather than war refugees or political dissidents. Also, many of them already applied in Italy or elsewhere before arriving here, disqualifying them for protection in Germany under European law.

A refugee shelter in Munich. Photo: Louisa Marie Summer for The Wall Street Journal

On paper, rejected asylum seekers should be swiftly deported. But most linger on, shielded by bureaucratic inertia, lack of resources or sympathetic judges.

A 20-year-old man from Sierra Leone who calls himself Mahmud said he had sailed from Libya on a rubber dinghy along with dozens of other migrants last summer; they were rescued and brought to a port in Sicily, where he registered as an asylum seeker.

Dressed in a branded polo shirt and baseball cap, a thick gold chain resting on his chest, Mahmud said he applied for asylum in Italy, claiming his life was in danger at home. But he said he didn’t wait for a decision and instead moved on to Germany because Italy provided no opportunity for people like him. He is now stuck in limbo, living on benefits at the shelter but unable to work.

“They are not treating us right here,” he said. “I think it is the politicians’ fault.”

It is people like Mahmud that Mr. Seehofer and Markus Söder, Bavaria’s state premier, now want to turn back directly at the border, even though that would mean erecting new checkpoints to slow down EU crossings that are now unimpeded, and, say critics, an element of racial profiling to screen out noncitizens.

Ms. Merkel’s refusal to comply has fueled frustration beyond the CSU and even beyond Germany.

“The disorderly immigration of 2015 was a fundamental mistake,” Mr. Söder wrote in an op-ed in the Die Welt daily last week. “Citizens want a safe Europe, which protects their cultural identity.”

CDU legislators led by Jens Spahn, Ms. Merkel’s health care minister and one of her harshest in-house critics, have privately and publicly sided with the CSU.

And in Europe, conservative and far-right politicians from Austria, Italy and Hungary have joined the chorus of Merkel critics. In something of a diplomatic affront, Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian Chancellor, went as far as supporting Mr. Seehofer at a joint press conference in Berlin. During the event, he described the anti-Merkel alliance in Southeastern Europe as an “axis of the willing.”

As the CSU closes ranks behind Messrs. Seehofer and Söder, it is not clear that the party’s challenge to Ms. Merkel is endearing it to voters. A survey by the Forsa polling group for broadcaster RTL on Monday showed only 37 and 38% of Bavarian voters were satisfied with the work of Mr. Seehofer and of the Bavarian premier respectively. Some 43% said they were positive about the performance of the chancellor.

Likewise, the Kantar Public poll that showed German voters as a whole supported the CSU’s line on immigration also showed 58% of respondents wanted Ms. Merkel to remain in power.

Whatever the outcome of the standoff, however, Mr. Sichert says the main winner is already clear: The AfD and its message.

“Our time has come—the time of upright patriots who fight for their country. Our ambition is not to get into government, but to put so much pressure on the conservatives they adopt our migration policy,” Mr. Sichert said. “And it’s working.”