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Yesterday afternoon, as politicians and journalists across Europe were reacting to the very strong results for the AFD (Alternativ fur Deutschland) in German state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, my eyes were drawn to this story from Euronews in 2022:
Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel has been hailed for her “great moral and political courage” in supporting asylum seekers.
The 68-year-old received the praise as she was awarded the Nansen Prize from the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) on Tuesday.
During Merkel’s tenure, Germany welcomed more than 1.2 million refugees and asylum seekers at the height of the 2015-16 migrant crisis.
At the time, Merkel said the influx was “a test for our European values as rarely before”, pointing to “a humanitarian imperative”.
In Ireland, we have a strange tendency to pride ourselves on traits that are, broadly speaking, universal. “Irish people are very welcoming”, we’ll say. “We’re broadly in favour of immigration and welcoming migrants and extending the best of ourselves to people who come here and make a positive contribution to Irish society by working hard and paying their taxes”
The thing is, the same thing is broadly true of the Germans. And the French. And the Czechs, and just about every western society. No society in the western world thinks of itself self-consciously as insular and xenophobic and intolerant of foreigners: To imagine oneself as welcoming and gracious is a form of self-praise and self-flattery that casts one in the feel-good role of saviour and beneficiary. That is why, in Germany as in Ireland, Frau Merkel’s 2015 great opening of the floodgates was initially met with enthusiasm. The Germans even had their own name for it: “Wilkommenskultur”, meaning “welcome culture”. The idea was so popular that the Austrians, bowled over by the magnanimity of their German neighbours, voted “Wilkommenskultur” as their “word of the year” for 2015. Imagine how thrilled some people would be in Dublin if the British voted céad míle fáilte their phrase of the year on foot of our immigration policy: RTE would do a news special from London, most like.
It got even better for the Germans as the New York Times, the most important newspaper in the world, was effusive: As Germany Takes In Refugees, It Also Rehabilitates Its Image, bellowed Katrinn Benhold in September 2015 citing the delirium that paved the welcome culture:
But the images of migrants chanting “Germany, Germany” as they weave their way across the Continent toward their new promised land have moved many in a country that has for decades been trying to atone for the genocide it committed in World War II. In the words of Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose apparent mercilessness during the Greek bailout talks prompted mocked-up photographs of her dressed in Nazi uniform: “The world sees Germany as a country of hope and opportunity, and that was certainly not always the case.”
If you look closely here, really closely, you might see some parallels with Ireland. Tell me if you’ve spotted them.
Anyway, if we flash forward most of a decade, where are the Germans on immigration today? Ignore, for a moment, the AfD, which is the most radical right wing party on the issue in Germany. Let’s look instead at Angela Merkel’s own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which actually won the election in Saxony:
German opposition leader Friedrich Merz urged the government to enforce the Dublin Regulation after meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday (27 August) and suggested declaring a state of national emergency if the rules cannot be enforced.
In the wake of an alleged stabbing attack by a Syrian migrant that left three people dead, the federal government’s migration policy is at the top of the political agenda at a time when the ruling coalition is under immense pressure and is expected to lose two upcoming state elections by large margins.
If such a change is not possible in the short term, the opposition leader demanded “to declare a national emergency with regard to refugees” to enforce the regulation, as national law could then trump EU legislation.
The CDU, incidentally, is the former party of Frau Merkel. A political party that has gone, in just nine years, from Wilkommenskultur to “we need to declare a national emergency to allow us to suspend EU law in order to reduce the number of migrants and refugees”.
The thing here is that you don’t need to be a particularly smart person to observe what happened: The Germans were granted a taste of large scale immigration, and greeted it initially with glee and enthusiasm. Nine years later, having initially believed that immigration might shake off Germany’s indelible association with the Nazis, many Germans are voting in apparent desperation for a political party – the AfD – which remains the closest thing German politics has to an intellectual successor to Herr Hitler.
In Ireland, the country is on, broadly speaking, the same curve. Our own experience of mass immigration came about half a decade later, with the surge we have all lived through commencing in about 2019 or 2020, and really only becoming an issue of mass public concern in 2023. We are about five years behind the Germans. Why does anyone think that our trajectory will be in any way different?
As in Germany, the decision to open the gates was taken not by the left, but by a Government led by Fine Gael, a party that is about as close as mainstream Irish politics gets to being centre-right (indeed it shares an EU group, the EPP, with Merkel’s now regretful CDU). As in Germany, the influx was initially greeted with untrammeled enthusiasm from the great and the good, which has slowly abated into recognition that there might be problems. As in Germany, there are the electoral beginnings of a hard-right rebellion, though we are half a decade or so behind.
The powers that be, in Ireland, have right in front of them a blueprint for what is likely to happen here over the next few years, absent a course correction. Do we think they might act to prevent such an outcome? I confess that I for one do not – that would require pattern recognition, and understanding that Ireland and Germany are not very different at all. Our céad míle fáilte is not some uniquely Irish thing that foreigners wouldn’t understand: It’s just the Irish word for Wilkommenskultur. That didn’t help the Germans, and it won’t help us, either.
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