Last week, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), introduced a nonbinding motion in the Bundestag to tighten the country’s immigration procedures. It called for an extension of police powers to remove rejected asylum seekers and make it harder for admitted refugees to bring over their families from abroad. Although the motion was passed with support from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), it subsequently failed to turn into an actual bill when members of Merz’s own party abstained from voting.

Merz, who is one of the strongest candidates to become chancellor after the February 23 federal elections, evidently believed he could weaken the AfD’s influence by showing voters that he, too, listened to their concerns about immigration and national security, giving both himself and his party an electoral boost. Instead, he divided Germany’s political establishment by breaching the so-called Brandmauer or “firewall,” a long-standing agreement among the major parties not to cooperate with far-right extremists. As a result, the CDU lies wounded, while the AfD, capitalizing on the ongoing chaos, is looking stronger than ever before.

The call to defend a “firewall” reflects the reality that even historical Nazism reached power through democratic means, via the connivance of more established forces. Yet in today’s Germany, parties from the Christian Democrats to former Die Linke spokeswoman Sahra Wagenknecht’s party (BSW) — which also voted in favor of Merz’s motions — are increasingly tempted to incorporate right-wing stances into their own programs in the hope that doing so will help them at the polls. But as history showed, and current events are showing once again, this strategy not only strengthens the movements they wish to keep in check, but also damages their collective ability to stop them from taking over.

Even if these votes did not actually produce new legislation, last weekend, more than 160,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Berlin to protest Merz’s symbolically significant betrayal of the firewall. Away from the protests themselves, Rolf Mützenich, a representative of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — currently in government, and the CDU’s primary opponent — accused Merz of opening “the gates of hell,” while Angela Merkel, returning to the public sphere after the publication of her 2024 memoir, urged former party to “work across party lines” against the AfD, and not resort to “tactical maneuvers” at one another’s expense.

Merz went against Merkel’s advice — a decision which could be seen as yet another attempt to ingratiate himself to AfD voters, who generally despise the former chancellor for her role in the 2015 migrant crisis and in European integration in general. He not only stood by his anti-immigration motions, but also criticized his potential postelection coalition partners, the Greens and Social Democrats, for refusing to join him in taking a stronger stance on national security.

Despite talking the AfD’s language — he has spoken of “daily gang rapes committed by asylum seekers” — Merz insists he did not work with the party. “The AfD wants to destroy the CDU,” he told DW over the weekend. “You can’t seriously believe that I would have talks with those who openly declare that they want to destroy my party.”

However, the truth is that his party has been collaborating with the AfD, especially on the municipal level. A study from the Berlin Social Science Center published on January 30, 2025, found more than 484 cases of collaboration between 2019 and 2024, with the CDU breaching the firewall more than any other party. The researchers also found that collaboration most often occurs on bills related to issues like infrastructure, which can be written off as unpolitical and uncontroversial despite their socioeconomic implications.

On the national level, Merz is relying on a similar playbook. He treats the call for immigration control not as an overblown, racially colored response to misinformation campaigns about violent incomers — the Saudi Arabian psychiatrist who drove his SUV into the crowd at Magdeburg’s Christmas market in December was in fact both an Islamophobe and an AfD supporter — but a practical issue requiring a practical response.

Instead of taking Merz’s olive branch, the AfD’s leadership has been quick to paint the prospective chancellor as weak, inconsistent, and unfit for the role. The nationalist party’s leader Alice Weidel says he “can’t be a candidate” and welcomed “the implosion of [his] popular establishment party” as he got himself into a sparring match with Merkel. If Merz — who “jumped in as a tiger and ended up as a bedside rug” — had hoped to show that stricter immigration control could be accomplished without the AfD, his subsequent fumbling sent out a different and far more dangerous message: that “there can only be a turnaround on migration and real political change with the Alternative für Deutschland.”

Polls suggest this message is resonating with a sizable minority of the electorate. As reported by the Financial Times, the Christian Democrats’ prospective share of votes has been in decline since late last year, currently hovering around 30 percent, while the AfD’s has climbed above 20 percent, with one survey last week putting the two parties just six points apart. The fact that a majority of Germans currently think that the country should take in fewer refugees bodes ill for the CDU and well for the AfD — a situation that could develop further still with new American tariffs on European imports, weakening Germany’s ailing economy.

The AfD looks set to drastically expand its presence in the Bundestag following the February 23 elections. Even if it somehow fails, Merz’s actions — and the division they have sown among the major parties — will surely make it difficult for the Christian Democrats to form a coalition that can govern the country effectively, let alone maintain a strong front against the far right.  Either way, the AfD stands to benefit.