Germany as ‘a country of integration’? The CDU/CSU’s policies and discourses on immigration during Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the CDU/CSU’s immigration policies and discourses during the Chancellorship of Angela Merkel. In doing so, it makes four observations. First, the article highlights that the CDU/CSU became proactive when it came to passing new and far-reaching immigration and integration legislation. Second, it is argued that these policies have sent conflicting messages, torn between the opening and closing of Germany’s borders, and between welcoming diversity and demanding cultural assimilation. Third, this article identifies and explains six ways in which the parties have framed immigration in their common election manifestos from 2005 to 2017: as a cultural, economic, security, humanitarian, European, and gendered issue. Fourth, this study analyses the intra-party divisions that came to a head during the migration crisis: the place of Islam in Germany and the creation of a cap on the number of refugees that Germany would take in. Here, it is highlighted that in contrast to Merkel, the CSU, but also parts of the CDU, have called for more restrictive immigration policies and cultural assimilation. These findings are explained with reference to the political context: the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the 2018 Bavarian regional elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Angela Merkel
• CDU/CSU
• immigration
• integration
• Germany
• Leitkultur

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Merkel was also CDU leader between 2000 and 2018.

2 Seehofer was CSU leader and minister president of Bavaria from 2008 until 2019. In March 2018 he became home secretary in Merkel’s 4th coalition government.

3 The German Democratic Republic (GDR) also became more diverse, although the number of migrant workers (mainly from other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and later on, Cuba, Mozambique, Vietnam) was relatively small. The GDR received only few refugees (Bade and Oltmer 2004).

4 ‘A person with a migration background’ is a term that was officially introduced by the Federal Statistical Office in 2005. It is relatively broad and describes a person who does not hold German citizenship by birth or who has at least one parent who does not hold German citizenship by birth (Statistisches Bundesamt 2018). For a critical discussion on the use of the term, see Will (2020).