What stood out to me across these readings was how much depends on the word “remigration” and how differently it gets defined. The InfoMigrants explainer covers the AfD’s migration positions going into the February 2025 election, when delegates voted the term into the federal program. Officially it means deporting people with no right to stay, removing criminals, and sending refugees back once the reason they fled is gone, with Syrians given as the example. That reminded me of the Syrian doctors from our earlier reading, since it is the same argument about going home after Assad, now written into a party program. By the CNN piece in April 2026, the Saxony-Anhalt branch had built its manifesto around the word and extended it to Ukrainian refugees, and Ulrich Siegmund was telling delegates in Magdeburg, “We say yes to consistent deportations.” More and more I see similarities between this far-right movement in Germany and that of the MAGA movement in the US. I even recently saw a video interviewing AfD supporters at a rally in which multiple were donning MAGA paraphernalia.
The Courthouse News article was the most interesting to read in hindsight. Cain Burdeau describes the week in January 2025 when Friedrich Merz passed a non-binding migration motion with AfD votes and then lost the binding bill 350 to 338, after at least 12 members of his own party didn’t vote for it. The headline says the firewall held, though one of the political scientists he quotes says it fell. I found Benjamin Höhne’s point the most convincing, which is that dismantling the firewall ends up legitimizing the AfD’s positions on migration. On September 6 the AfD won 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority. In Burdeau’s article the firewall is about whose votes Merz would accept, and in Magdeburg it is now what keeps the largest party in the state out of government.
The Economist piece complicated that picture for me. It starts in Gelsenkirchen, where the AfD took about 30 percent of the council vote in September 2025. But it argues that the AfD did slightly worse across North Rhine-Westphalia than in the federal election, that the party is much weaker in wealthier, graduate-heavy cities like Cologne and Münster, and that strong AfD results tend to mobilize its opponents. It predicted the party would lose its mayoral runoffs, and it lost all three. I think the argument still holds, because two weeks after Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin put Die Linke first with 25.7 percent.
I think this matters most for our trip to Berline. I expect people in Berlin to describe the city as the opposite of Saxony-Anhalt, and my nightlife story is partly a way of testing that, since Arab and Turkish men report being turned away at club doors regardless of who wins elections. I also noticed that Burdeau quotes politicians and two political scientists but nobody the bill would have applied to. I’d want to hear from someone with a migration background in Magdeburg about how the firewall looks from there.
