At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, when Germany was questioning its ability to integrate hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, chancellor Angela Merkel uttered a phrase that has remained famous within the country: "Wir schaffen das" – "We can do this." Ten years later, her potential successor, Friedrich Merz, candidate for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and frontrunner in the February 23 parliamentary elections, is publicly taking the opposite view: "Das werden wir nicht schaffen" ("We can't do this"), he declared on January 20 at a rally in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border.

Two days later, Germany was plunged into mourning by another knife attack, by a 28-year-old illegal Afghan in Aschaffenburg, northern Bavaria, killing two people, including a 2-year-old child. Already dominated by immigration issues since the murderous attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market on December 20, 2024, Merz's short campaign has become even more radicalized: the day after the attack, on January 23, he called for a drastic turnaround in the country's migration policy, citing the "damage of 10 years of misguided asylum and immigration policy in Germany." Since 2015, Germany has taken in between two and three million refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and, more recently, Ukraine.

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