As Germany gears up for parliamentary elections this Sunday, the country’s struggling economy and the future of immigration policy are top of mind for voters.
The snap election comes after the collapse of the “traffic light” coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz last December. His party, the Social Democrats, is trailing third in the polls, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union and the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
When the coalition came to power, Berlin resident Kim Noack, 28, said she was excited because the other two coalition partners, the Green Party and the Free Democrats, were popular among young people in Germany. But, that coalition is now defunct.
“Right now, I’m quite disappointed because I feel like they were not really listening to the demands of the people and what we wished for,” Noack said.
A former supporter of the Free Democrats, Noack said she’s now supporting the Christian Democrats because the country needs to change its policies, including on immigration.
“Globalization and migration … is a good thing,” said Noack, whose husband emigrated from Argentina to Germany. “But I just think that it’s important that we regulate that from a good … point of view to support people coming here [who] want to work and integrate in our system.”
Voter Antje Buttker, 56, expressed similar views on immigration: “Everyone can come here, but they should get a job and integrate.”
But the major parties, she said, have been “thoughtless” on issues like immigration policy. She believes the party to turn things around was the far-right AfD.
“Because I hope that something will improve,” said Buttker, who works as a caregiver for patients with dementia. “That we no longer let everyone in. That our German people still have rights. My mother can’t even get a nursing home placement or a cardiologist — all because everything is taken.”
Polls show that one in five Germans support the AfD, a far-right party with members monitored by Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which keeps members under surveillance as party affiliates are considered extremist organizations “against the principles of democracy.”
Last year, AfD officials were revealed to be associating with neo-Nazis and planning a policy of “remigration” to deport immigrants. The revelations sparked massive nationwide protests.
“It’s far easier to defend a democracy than to fight a dictatorship,” said Tareq Alaows on stage at a demonstration against the AfD in Berlin last Sunday. Thousands attended the event held at Bebelplatz, the site of an infamous Nazi bookburning in 1933.
Alaows arrived in Germany in 2015 from Syria, after fleeing the Assad regime for political and religious reasons. At the time, the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel was rolling out the welcome mat to the thousands of Syrian asylum seekers crossing into the country.
Merkel, who led the Christian Democrats, famously said of the influx of migrants: “We’ll manage it.”
Now, the party’s current leader and the election’s frontrunner, Friedrich Merz, has vowed to close the country’s borders to all undocumented migrants.
“People are very afraid,” Alaows told The World. He became a German citizen in the decade since arriving and now works with refugee rights group Pro Asyl. “People are very afraid, and many people are considering emigrating.”
In this election, he’s backing the Left Party, which he believes to be the party looking out for immigrants in the current election.
“Germany has had three years of economic stagnation … so the economy’s basically at zero growth,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research.
Fratzscher says if the German government really wants to yank the economy up off its knees, it needs migrants.
“With the demographic shift, more and more baby boomers retiring, Germany’s economic future very much depends on whether it is able to attract immigrants,” Fratzscher said. “Not just highly qualified engineers, but also along all skill levels, over the coming 10 to 15 years.”
Joshua Coe contributed from Berlin.