In October 2025, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was criticised for stating that a “problem in the cityscape” could be, and would be, solved by deporting immigrants. Merz has long normalised anti-migratory, Islamophobic ideas and it is therefore unsurprising that he has continued to co-opt far-right ideals, particularly the intertwining of violence against women and antisemitism with immigration, in his current role. In this piece, we draw on Brown et al (2023)’s argument that the political mainstream plays an active role in normalising far-right ideas and on Newth et al (2025)’s call to reframe the far right from a categorisation to a political position to argue that Merz has played a central and active role in the normalisation of far-right ideas and narratives.
More specifically, we argue that the gap between Merz and the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is not wide, particularly in light of his tradition of tirades against Muslims and Islam, and his adoption of a culturalist, civilisational lens to explain societal malaises: gender-based violence and antisemitism. We illustrate this argument through Merz’s over-attribution of blame for misogyny and antisemitism in German society to Islam. We conclude by arguing that Merz’s long adoption of culturalist, far-right ideas has dangerous implications for German democracy: the tools of liberal democracy may be able to superficially restrain the AfD as a party, but will be far more ineffective against the spread of its ideas, especially when represented by the AfD and the centre-right CDU/CSU.
Friedrich Merz has been a member of the CDU for his whole political career. He was first elected to the European Parliament in 1989 and then to the German parliament (Bundestag) in 1994. It was during his tenure as leader of the CDU parliamentary group in 2000 that he suggested that immigrants should declare their commitment to the German “Leitkultur.” The latter term, literally meaning German guiding culture, was conceived in the 1990s by German-Syrian professor Bassam Tibi. It has been co-opted by conservative politicians to mean a strict set of “German” values and cultural markers vulnerable to infiltration (and, implicitly, destruction from within) by multiculturalism. This was responded to favourably at the time by the far-right party Die Republikaner and has been taken up by the AfD following the latter’s increasing radicalisation since 2015. According to the AfD’s 2025 manifesto, “Leitkultur” is based along historic ultra-nationalist, implicitly white European lines, namely Christianity, the “scientific and humanist tradition”, and Roman law. Merz’s reference to “Leitkultur” is emblematic of the kind of cultural conservatism that Angela Merkel opposed. Despite their differences, Merkel and Merz shared leadership of the CDU for two years from 2000, him as parliamentary group leader and her as party chairwoman. A protracted power struggle led to Merz’s supersession and demotion to deputy parliamentary group leader in 2002, and eventual resignation from the party leadership in 2004. In 2007, Merz announced his withdrawal from politics, but he returned following Merkel’s decision to step down as chairwoman of the CDU in 2018. He ran for the role twice before regaining his direct parliamentary mandate in the 2021 German elections. Only in late 2021, on his third attempt, did he win the internal vote to be party leader.
Back in 2000, Merz wrote a think piece in Welt, responding to criticism for his use of the term “Leitkultur.” He used arguments which are useful to contextualise his reliance on anti-antisemitism and femonationalism today. First, he contrasted the “integral part of the identity of our democratic system” as “the status of women in our society, which has been hard-won over many years and decades” with “those who, predominantly for religious reasons, hold a very different view.” In one over-simplified stroke, Merz glorified the status of women in Germany, despite in 1997 voting against the criminal liability of rape in marriage, and argued that some immigrants would therefore be incompatible with this allegedly uniquely European, German cultural liberalism. More implicitly, Merz also stated that “since the Second World War, German culture has been profoundly shaped by the European ideal.” While making no mention of Jews or antisemitism, the centrality of Holocaust memory and the ostensible “overcoming” of Nazism through the European integration project mean that this statement creates the foundations for the normalised blame-shifting or “subcontracting” of antisemitism, supposedly eradicated in the newly civilised Europe, to Islam. Paul Spiegel, the President of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, strongly criticised Merz’s use of the term at the time.
Antisemitism
Since the early 2000s, the externalisation of antisemitism has become standard practice for German conservatives. Antisemitism is considered the fault of the non-German, the cultural Other, the amalgamated everyday Muslim with a radical Islamist. Crucially, this means that antisemitism can no longer be the fault of the “native” German, who, as part of the new, post-1945 Europe, has allegedly overcome antisemitism. Merz has taken up both narratives.
While the AfD has often been the focus of media and scholarly attention for relativising the Holocaust, most famously when co-leader Alexander Gauland referred to the Nazi period as “bird shit in over 1000 years of successful German history”, Merz has not been free of similar controversy. In 2004, at a CDU/CSU party meeting, he referred to his grandfather as a role model, the same grandfather who was a local politician under the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1937 and enthusiastically praised Hitler. While this kind of controversy is not on the same level as that further to the right, it makes it more dubious for Merz to now blame antisemitism on others. The CDU has also seen antisemitic controversy under Merz’s leadership, with no clear response from the latter. In April 2022, Minister President of Saxony Michael Kretschmer (albeit on the more right-wing end of the party) tweeted that there was trust “between Germans and Jews”, implying that Jews are not German.
More blatantly, Merz has enthusiastically adopted the narrative of “anti-”antisemitism which has been repeated by the AfD and by The Republikaner before them. This can be linked to Holocaust remembrance, to give it further emotional salience. Gradually, Merz has reframed the threat of antisemitism as coming from immigration and Islam, shifting to a more accentuated civilisational, culturalist approach. On Holocaust Memorial Day in 2020, a Facebook post on his official profile noted that “75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we are again experiencing antisemitism – predominantly from the right, but also due to immigration in 2015/16. Many bring Jew-hatred, which was preached in their homeland.” It is worthy of note that Merz does not mention the Nazi regime or any perpetrators of the Holocaust, therefore all the attention is given to the contemporary setting. This mirrors narratives shared by the AfD: on the same day, AfD politician Stephan Protschka posted on Facebook that “antisemitism comes mainly from Islamist immigration.”
Merz has only increased his use of this narrative, as he talks less about the right and more about Islam and immigration, particularly in the wake of the 7 October terror in Israel. In 2023, he said that Germany had “enough antisemitic young men” and in 2025, he said that “we have an imported antisemitism with the large number of immigrants who’ve come here since 2015”, referring to an alleged “state doctrine” of antisemitism in the home countries of immigrants to Germany. This “state doctrine” then comes into direct conflict with Germany’s own “Staatsräson” (Reason of State), the commitment to Israel articulated by Merkel in 2008, which not only signals incompatibility, but also masks racism behind a perceived ideological conflict between the state discourse and Israel-critical positions. The CDU’s commitment to Israel, furthermore, does not correlate with a commitment to combatting antisemitism in all its forms. On the contrary, there is an increasing restriction of federal funds allocated to NGOs on the premise that they are ideologically-aligned or politically activist. Some of these engage in important work on, inter alia, political education on antisemitism and other forms of hate speech, such as the Anne Frank Bildungsstätte, and on investigating far-right networks, such as Correctiv. Ironically, part of Merz’s reasoning was that these NGOs are “not simply ‘against the right’, but also quite specifically against us [CDU/CSU]”.
The obsessive “Staatsräson”[1] as a moral and ethical commitment acts as a reflection of a certain progressive world (vis-a-vis a regressive, non-belonging one) and represents a hegemonic repertoire that serves to “immunise the identitarian re-entrenchment and its supremacist implications from contestation and critique by ideological and repressive means.” It has become a façade for German political moralisation of anti-migratory positions and crackdowns on critical speech by positioning the sole responsibility of antisemitism—merged with anti-Israelism and Israel-critique in the German mainstream political discourses—on Muslims, migrants, left-wing activists, and intellectuals.
Antisemitic views are held by individuals across belief systems, and this should not be minimised. But the oversimplified, singular focus on the perceived cultural “Other” as the source of antisemitism must be subject to critical scrutiny. This connection between immigration, antisemitism, and Islam serves only to reinforce the othering of Muslim minorities vis-a-vis the apparently reformed, liberal, accepting German, thus reinventing orientalist, anti-Muslim positions shared between the far right and the mainstream.
Femonationalism
The sexual exploitation complaint filed by actress Collien Fernandes against her ex-husband, Christian Ulmen, has been the catalyst for a nation-wide discussion on the safety of women and the effectiveness of measures of protection against gender-based violence in Germany. The affair also points to the systemic failures of the state in this regard. Chancellor Friedrich Merz backgrounded the details of the case to talk about sexual violence and the “image of women” within “Muslim” communities, criticising other parties (mainly the Greens) for being “reluctant” to approach gender issues from a cultural perspective. In his intervention Merz said that the Greens had failed to discuss the “concept of family in Islam” and the “image of women that sometimes prevails in these societies.” He went on to say that “a considerable portion of this violence originates from immigrant groups in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Merz’s culturalist explanation of gendered violence mirrors a wider political tactic shared with the more “extreme” right: the use of women’s experiences to moralise anti-Muslim and anti-migratory ideologies, and to legitimise hard-line migration policies. Culturalist explanations of gendered violence take prominence in the Mainstream’s discourse, while femicide is still not made a legal concept in Germany, making such crimes not only indistinct from other forms of violence, but framed as inherently racialised, imported, and external. After all, Merz explicitly linked women’s safety issues to migration to moralise tougher policies: in an ostensible defence of his linking immigration to a problem in the “cityscape”, which this piece opened with, he told a journalist to “ask your daughters” about their safety fears. This is particularly contradictory coming from someone who, as noted above, voted against the criminal liability of marital rape, sustained a male-dominated political structure in his party, and unironically proclaimed that he “cannot be sexist if he is married to a woman”.
Mirroring a (neo)-liberal tradition of exclusion and echoing reactionary, far-right rhetorics and communicative skills, Merz’s myopic framing of women’s safety as inherently foreign or Muslim serves a femonationalist approach that reinforces orientalist, anti-Muslim racism, and that legitimises hard-line anti-migratory positions. In turn, it diverts attention from core gender-related issues and the failures of the system to deal with it as a structural problem. Merz’s concern with women and “daughters” constitutes not a genuine concern with women, but a strategic approach to the construction of society within a logic of insider/outside, liberal/illiberal, or democratic/regressive.
Femonationalism, in other words, constitutes one of the rhetorical resources of reactionary, nationalist, far-right parties; one that is now selectively picked up and applied by the “centre” and “fringes”, albeit to different degrees of intensification. The far right instrumentalises and hyper-emotionalises scattered evidence to frame gendered violence as inherently external through blanket accusations, legitimising racist views on foreigners and Muslim minorities. Actors taking far-right stances therefore find it suitable to proclaim concern for women safety and gender equality–albeit holding conservative positions on gender rights, performances, and roles–to mitigate their extreme outlook and soften their image to outsiders vis-a-vis the illiberal, foreign others.
Already Mainstreamed?
In this Redlines paper, we have looked at Merz as a representation of a political mainstream that does not shy away from expressing what it proclaims to be countering, namely far-right ideals and discourses, and moralising hard-line positions against migration and exclusionary discourses against Muslims. This also has implications for the weaponisation of antisemitism in Israel-related debates. If Germany’s “Staatsräson” is an unshakeable commitment to Israel, any debate or criticism surrounding Israel’s genocidal military policy can be used to legitimise policing, repression, and censorship against political opposition, grassroots movements, and academic spaces.
This signifies a substantial but carefully hidden problem at the core of “Western democracies”: racism is embedded within the political so-called “centre” and not only within extreme “fringe” movements. Because of the stigma of overt racism following the Holocaust, and the entrenched belief that post-1945 European nations have “overcome” the Nazi past to embrace liberal values, this cannot be openly acknowledged and approached in a self-critical manner. Instead, the idea of protecting Jews and women from the political, civilisational other is normalised across the board, avoiding the failure to take substantial measures to address (digital) violence and algorithmic complicity, among others. For wider politics, the prevalence of culturalist explanations and emergency rhetorics as shared resources between the mainstream and the far right suggest that, on some subjects, we are perhaps past discussions about the mainstreaming of the far right and entering—if we have not already entered—a post-mainstreaming phase.
The mere idea of a Brandmauer–in essence a firewall against the rise and consolidation of fascist politics in post-1945 Germany–implies that the actor-to-be-excluded is the “extremist”, and the rest are the norm, following Brown et al (2023). In response, we emphasise the strategic radicalisation of the German political consensus and its increasing normalisation of exclusionary discourses and positions. Merz and his party claim to sustain a Brandmauer: the cordon sanitaire against the return of fascist politics, or the initial commitment to, inter alia, International Law and the Geneva Convention. But this has become a mere political game between German parties, which is progressively reduced from an ethical responsibility to a political performance about not cooperating with the far right, while concurrently appropriating the latter’s racist rhetoric.
This is all symptomatic of a large shift towards ethnonationalist, reactionary politics, exactly the post-fascist politics the Brandmauer was supposed to keep at bay. Now, the shift by both the radicals and the so-called mainstream is going at full speed. This is evident in the coordination between the centre and far right in the European and municipal levels, including Merz’s CDU/CSU’s historic alignment with the far-right AfD to introduce a motion to curb the number of incoming migrants, or in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn’s suggestion to start treating the AfD “like any other opposition party” given their electoral base, suggesting a less dismissive approach.
In this context, how is this cordon sanitaire supposed to survive if it is undermined from within? The core is speaking like the extremist fringe, sustaining a progressively hostile environment against grassroots political oppositions and minorities, and even legitimising the presence and positions of the far right. Within this shift towards a nationalist, authoritarian consensus, led by this establishment, the culturalist explanations for antisemitism and misogyny, akin to the far right, reduce the world to a basic civilisational dichotomy: the progressive West, a philosemitic and gender-friendly world, and its nemesis and threat, namely Islam and emigration countries as the civilisational “Other”, covering for the state’s failure to deal with fundamental societal issues, and uncovering the mainstream’s active normalisation of reactionary politics.
[1] We propose Pankaj Mishra’s chapter “Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism” from the book The World After Gaza (2025) for a critical historical overview of the German commitment to Israel since 1948.
Dr Mohamed Salhi is an early-career researcher and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, working at the intersection of political science, sociology, and linguistics. He is currently working on his first book, Crisis Discourse of the Radical Right, for the Cambridge University Press Series in Critical Discourse Studies. His research interests include critical discourse analysis, crisis discourse, far-right populism, visual populism, and the mainstreaming of the far right.
Dr Claire Burchett is a Research Associate at The Intra-Communal Professorial Group (ICPG). She recently completed her PhD at King’s College London, which analysed the social media output of three-far right populist parties, the Alternative for Germany, the Freedom Party of Austria, and the National Rally in France, to consider how antisemitism is used as a political tool in the strategic inclusion and exclusion of Jews from the body politic. Claire also holds a master’s degree in European Studies from King’s College London and a bachelor’s degree in German and Russian from the University of Cambridge.
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