Merz has made it clear that he is only going to accelerate Germany’s authoritarian decline, which primarily targets Arabs, Muslims and supporters of Palestine, writes James Jackson [photo credit: Getty Images]
The last 18 months have been awful for Germany’s five and a half million Muslims and it looks like they are only going to get worse.
Making up around 6.6 percent of the population with three million citizens, negative portrayals of Muslims and Arabs play an outsized role in the media and in politics, particularly since the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict, but with very little representation in either of these spheres.
Things were already bad – an EU study on Islam in Europe last year found that Germany was the second worst country in Europe for anti-Muslim racism – but with the most right-wing Parliament in the Federal Republic’s history, many Muslims, Arabs and other minorities are worried.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored the best result for the German far-right since World War Two at 20.8 percent, with fifty mentions of “Islam” or “Muslim” in their manifesto, none of them positive.
And though Alice Weidel has promoted herself as a “libertarian conservative”, and much has been made by Elon Musk and the international press of her lesbian marriage to a woman of colour, but she also claimed that “the hijab doesn’t belong to Germany” and that Islam is incompatible with Germany’s constitution in 2017.
Though the party are going to be kept out of government by Germany’s famed “firewall” against cooperation with the far-right, Chancellor apparent Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats has made it clear that he is only going to accelerate Germany’s authoritarian decline, which primarily targets Arabs, Muslims and supporters of Palestine.
It does this in defence of the so-called Staatsräson, the doctrine that Israel’s security is one of Germany’s top priorities. This was initially just a rhetorical flourish by Angela Merkel on the floor of the Israeli Knesset but has since then taken on a life of its own.
After over a million went on the streets to protest his collaboration with the far-right on a vote aimed at restricting asylum Merz asked rhetorically in his final speech on the campaign trail in Munich where the pro-democracy protests were “when Palestinian flags were swung in this country.”
To Mr Merz, showing the Palestinian flag, which is flown at the UN headquarters, is more scandalous than purposefully voting alongside a far-right party which campaigned on “remigration”.
He also recently promised to expand the law on racial incitement to make it illegal to do “deny Israel’s right to exist” – a highly controversial formulation with little basis in actual international law, and which doubtlessly will include Palestinians showing images of historic Palestine.
Germany’s case of déjà vu
One of Merz’s first moves after winning the election was to phone Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and invite him to Germany, despite the outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.
Though Germany’s outgoing “traffic light” coalition made clear that they weren’t likely to arrest Netanyahu, they were not going to roll out the red carpet either.
Merz on the other hand considered the invitation “an open challenge against the scandalous decision of the International Criminal Court to describe the Prime Minister as a war criminal” according to Netanyahu’s office.
No wonder that only 12 percent of Germany’s Muslims voted for the victorious conservative party according to pollsters Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.
The move was condemned by Amnesty International as an “open call to break the law” and “not a good start as future chancellor” while the Left Party, who received the most votes from Muslims in this election at 29 percent criticised it sharply.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnBut Merz is just a particularly extreme member of the Staatsräsonquerfront, a German word I have coined to describe the alliance between far-right through to the right, centre and even elements of the so-called “antideutsch” left to defend Israel at any costs, including trashing freedom of opinion and assembly, restricting citizenship rights and continuing to deliver weapons to a man wanted as a war criminal by the world’s highest court.
Under the guise of the noble goal of fighting antisemitism in the land of the Holocaust, Islam and Arabs have been turned into a problem, with German politicians failing to see the historical irony in stirring hatred against one religious and ethnic minority to supposedly protect another one, and with the far-right as steadfast allies this time around, with key pieces of legislation against “antisemitism” initially coming from or being voted for by the AfD.
After October 7, Muslims were told by liberal darling and vice chancellor Robert Habeck — now thankfully retiring from frontline politics — that their protection from right-wing extremists was conditional on distancing themselves from Hamas, considered a terror group in Germany.
Sixty eight percent of Muslims in Germany have experienced discrimination in the last five years, with a sharp rise across Europe since 2022, so this danger is hardly theoretical. Mosques have already seen numerous bomb threats and property damage to mosques, as well as hate messages, the Muslim Coordination Council (Krm) in Cologne said in late January.
“In mosque communities, people are scared that fascists will come and take us away” newly-elected Left party politician Ferat Koçak told The New Arab on election night from the Arabic district of Neukölln. Koçak became the first Left MP to ever win outside of former East Germany.
“It is very important that we give people, our friends and neighbours, the feeling of security” he said, representing a growing anti-racist wing within his party, whose revival was one of the big surprises of the election.
Protecting citizens and inhabitants is one of the key jobs of a state – an actual Staatsräson– and should never be conditional on what people believe. We’ve seen Germany go down that route before, and it did not end well.
James Jackson is a Berlin-based journalist and host of the Mad in Germany podcast, available on YouTube and Spotify
Follow him on X: @derJamesJackson
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.