It was perhaps the most dramatic week for German politics in decades as the Bundestag on Friday held three nail-biting votes to tighten migration rules after yet another terrorist attack committed by a foreigner.

Horrified by the Aschaffenburg attack on Jan 22, in which a rejected Afghan asylum seeker killed two people – including a toddler, opposition leader Friedrich Merz declared that enough was enough.

The centre-Right leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU) party said he was bringing three motions to parliament that demanded the closure of Germany’s borders to illegal migrants, tougher internal security measures and curbs on the rights of asylum seekers already in Germany.

But the announcement was immensely controversial: in order to pass the motions, Mr Merz would need support from the far-Right Alternative For Germany (AfD) party, a pariah in parliament despite polling at second place ahead of this month’s election.

While Mr Merz insisted that the motions were in the national interest, his rivals accused him of trying to destroy Germany’s firewall, or cordon sanitaire, a long-standing commitment not to cooperate with the far-Right in the Bundestag, the federal parliament.

When the first two motions, which were not legally binding, came before parliament on Wednesday, the atmosphere in the chamber was uncharacteristically tense.