As migrant problems rise, Merkel's former party blasts German asylum policy | Eastern NC Now

The asylum policies of progressive former Christian Democrat chancellor Angela Merkel created the illegal immigration problem that Germany faces today.  The party's more conservative current leader Friedrich Merz is pushing a reversal of those policies. He recently dumped an old Merkel operative as the party powerful Secretary General and replaced him with an immigration hardliner from the party's right wing.

Now Merz is praising a column penned by his deputy chairman Thorsten Frei in a major German newspaper, Frantfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,, calling for an end to Germany's current asylum policies.  It is titled "Our right to asylum is based on a lie".  That column proposes only accepting asylum applications direct from the home country, not from people showing up at the border.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/german-cdu-shifts-right-merz-backs-proposal-to-abolish-current-asylum-regime/

This comes as the populist / nationalist right anti-immigration Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) is making rapid political gains in local and state elections and in the polls.  AfD is now the leading party in the polls across the states of eastern Germany, several of which have state elections next year, and is rapidly rising in western German states. A poll released last week in the important western German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, showed AfD gaining seven percentage points, while the three parties of the governing national coalition all lost ground, a cumulative total of a loss of seven points between them.  The CDU remained the largest party in that state, losing a single percentage point.

In national polls, AfD is now the leading party overall, but if the numbers for the CDU and its more conservative Bavarian partner party, the CSU are combined, the CDU and CSU together are in first place nationally and AfD second.

https://rmx.news/germany/germanys-afd-party-rises-in-the-west-hits-record-19-in-baden-wurttemberg/

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/07/23/alternative-for-germany-party-surges-in-polls-as-support-for-populism-rises/