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Between populist rhetoric and pragmatic policymaking: The normalization of migration as an electoral issue in German politics

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Abstract

In Germany issues of immigration and integration have gradually moved into the centre of competitive party politics over the past 20 years. This article highlights two central features of this development: First, in recent years there has been a notable gap between highly polarizing (populist) public debates on the one hand and a pragmatic shift in policymaking among the country’s mainstream parties on the other. Second, the immigration issue poses a considerable challenge to the core political identity of the centre-left and the centre-right. On the basis of a frame analysis of electoral politics this article argues that, in spite of immigrants’ traditional support for the Social Democratic Party, Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party has recently been successful in claiming ownership over the immigration issue by linking it to policy fields in which it commands public trust, namely economic and security policies.

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Notes

  1. Helmut Kohl, public speech, quoted in Rick Atkinson, ‘Top US envoy in Berlin criticizes Germans,’ The Washington Post, 16 April 1994. In German public discourse the term ‘country of imigration’ is regularly contrasted with the notion of a national community defined by features of ethnic or cultural homogenity.

  2. These parties and organizations – such as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party of Germany), the Republikaner (Republicans) and the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU, German People’s Union) – have always remained marginal to the political establishment, obtaining some minor and mostly highly transitory success in regional and local elections. This, however, did not prevent groups in civil society from engaging in the openly violent attacks that were so shockingly rampant in the early 1990s.

  3. Münstersche Zeitung, 8 November 1993.

  4. The CDU-CSU were able to gather more than 5 million signatures against the proposal (Koopmans, 1999).

  5. A total of 313 documents were analysed and coded according to the competing frames in Table 1 (CDU/CSU, 79; SPD, 89; FDP, 38; Greens, 65; The Left, 42). Documents could be coded for individual frames more than once or not at all, depending on the relative importance of one of these frames in organizing the meaning of the text.

    Table 1 Competing frames in the political debate on migration and integration
  6. Methodologically the analysis draws on discourse analysis in the tradition developed in social movement research (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993; Koopmans and Statham, 1999).

  7. In his media study and public discourse in Germany Bauder (2008) describes this as a tension, if not contradiction between depicting immigration as an economic necessity (competitiveness) and an economic liability in terms of its effects on employment and the welfare state.

  8. For instance, in a survey conducted in early 2013 by DATA 4 U, 64 per cent of immigrants with a Turkish background responded that they would vote for the SPD, as compared with 23 per cent for the Greens and only 7 per cent for the CDU/CSU: www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article116601596/SPD-will-die-Partei-der-Migranten-werden.html.

  9. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office defines this group as follows: ‘the population group with a migration background consists of all persons who have immigrated into the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, and of all foreigners born in Germany and all persons born in Germany who have at least one parent who immigrated into the country or was born as a foreigner in Germany.’ (see www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/MigrationIntegration/PersonsMigrationBackground/Current.html).

  10. The Dortmund-based research institute futureorg found that, mainly because of the Sarrazin debate and the reactions of the SPD, the Social Democrats have lost considerable support among migrants of Turkish descent. According to its recent 2013 survey, only 42 per cent of Turkish migrants intend to vote for the SPD, as compared with 50.2 per cent in 2009 (see http://taz.de/Wie-Deutschtuerken-waehlen/!121913/).

  11. To understand why this term provoked such a heated public debate, one has to be aware of the fact that it is somewhat reminiscent of Nazi theories of racial supremacy. For a critical analysis, see Pautz (2005).

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Schmidtke, O. Between populist rhetoric and pragmatic policymaking: The normalization of migration as an electoral issue in German politics. Acta Polit 50, 379–398 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.32

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