Bundestag vote on Merz's second immigration bill postponed amid mass protests in Germany!
A second bill seeking stricter rules on migration in Germany was delayed on Friday after a first proposal passed with votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany party earlier this week sparked mass protests.
The country's favorite to become the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was set to propose a motion calling for an end to family reunification for those with additional protection and increased powers for federal police officers to deport migrants, among other things.
Unlike the bill passed on Wednesday, this one is legally binding, meaning it would become law if the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by Merz could muster enough votes in support of it and if it passed the upper house of parliament.
However, as the debate was scheduled to begin, the CDU requested that the session be adjourned so that a party meeting could take place. During the break, negotiations took place between the CDU, the Social Democrats (SPD) of German leader Olaf Scholz and the Greens, according to local media.
The SPD and the Greens have sharply criticized Friday's bill, as well as the first one, which passed with a small majority on Wednesday.
The move, which called on Germany to turn away many migrants at its borders, sparked mass protests and a rare public rebuke from former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who previously led the CDU.
Merkel called Merz's decision to work with the AfD "wrong" and accused him of breaking the so-called "firewall" against the AfD, a political consensus made among other German parties to keep the far right out of power.
Across Germany, tens of thousands protested against Merz's decision and the prospect of the AfD gaining power, including about 10,000 gathered in Freiburg and about 6,000 outside the CDU headquarters in Berlin.
The CDU leader insisted that he wanted to pass his measures with the votes of the "democratic center", but that without the votes of other parties, he was prepared to accept the AfD's votes.
Scholz has suggested that, after Wednesday's vote, Merz can no longer be trusted not to enter a coalition with the AfD. The AfD is currently in second place with 23%, behind the CDU, which has 30%.
Merz has angrily rejected the suggestion and called on other parties to accept the necessity of his proposals to curb violence in Germany. The CDU leader has made migration a centerpiece of his campaign ahead of the country's February 23 election.
He stepped up his rhetoric on the subject after an asylum seeker from Afghanistan was arrested for a knife attack that killed a man and a 2-year-old boy in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg last week.
The incident followed knife attacks in Mannheim and Solingen last year, in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, and a separate attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, in which the suspect is a doctor of Saudi origin.
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