The centre-right CDU party leader sparked fierce backlash on Wednesday for accepting the far right’s support in pushing a first bill through parliament.
A second bill calling for stricter rules on migration in Germany was delayed on Friday after a first proposal passed with votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany party earlier this week sparked mass protests.
The country’s favourite to become next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was set to propose a motion asking for the end of family reunification for those with subsidiary protection and increased powers for federal police officers to deport migrants, among other points.
Unlike the bill passed on Wednesday, this one is legally binding, meaning it would become law if the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — led by Merz — could gather enough votes in support of it and if it passed the parliament’s upper house.
However, as the debate was slated to begin, the CDU requested that the session be interrupted so that a party meeting could take place. During the break, negotiations took place between the CDU, German leader Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens, according to domestic media.
The SPD and the Greens have fiercely criticised Friday’s bill as well as the first one, which passed with a razor-thin majority on Wednesday.
The measure, which called on Germany to turn away many more migrants at its borders, sparked mass protests and a rare public rebuke from former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who previously led the CDU.
Merkel called Merz’s decision to work with the AfD “wrong” and accused him of breaking the so-called “firewall” against the AfD — a political consensus made between Germany’s other parties to keep the far right out of power.
Across Germany, tens of thousands protested against Merz’s decision and the prospect of the AfD gaining power, including around 10,000 gathered in Freiburg and some 6,000 outside the CDU’s headquarters in Berlin.
The CDU leader insisted he wanted to pass his measures with votes from the “democratic centre” but that without votes from other parties, he was prepared to accept votes from the AfD.
Scholz has suggested that, after Wednesday’s vote, Merz can no longer be trusted not to enter into a coalition with the AfD. The AfD is currently polling second place with 23%, behind the CDU, which has 30%.
Merz has angrily rejected the suggestion and called on other parties to accept the necessity of his proposals to stem violence in Germany.
The CDU leader has made migration central to his campaign ahead of the country’s elections on 23 February.
He sharpened his rhetoric on the subject after an asylum seeker from Afghanistan was arrested over a knife attack that killed a man and a 2-year-old boy in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg last week.
The incident followed knife attacks in Mannheim and Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, and a separate attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg in which the suspect is a Saudi-born doctor.
