Action is Alexander Dobrindt’s watchword. Hours after becoming federal interior minister two weeks ago, the 54-year-old ramped up controls on Germany‘s borders and rescinded a decade-old order allowing undocumented asylum seekers into the country.
Federal and local police officers are now working round the clock to keep order on Germany’s 3,800km border – though it’s unclear as yet just how sustainable – or legal – the new regime actually is.
Until clarity comes, enacting Germany’s most radical border policy shift since the 2015 refugee crisis has allowed Dobrindt present himself as a sheriff in mainstream political Germany’s last-chance saloon.
Three months ago the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second, with nearly 21 per cent, in Germany’s federal election. For a time in the subsequent weeks, the party overtook even the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Bavarian allies, the more conservative Christian Social Union (CSU).
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As CSU interior minister, Dobrindt’s ambition is to restore the CDU/CSU political camp’s law-and-order profile, its weak spot since the Merkel era, and lure back conservative and protest voters lost to the AfD.
To that end no effort – or expense – is being spared. In total about 1,000 officers have been deployed, in some cases being flown in for shifts by helicopter.
Round-the-clock controls are operational at all major border crossings, where incoming traffic is throttled into one lane and suspicious vehicles are wave out for closer inspection. Mobile patrols have been tripled in frequency along many secondary border routes, popular with traffickers trying to avoid main checkpoints.
Last week Dobrindt, as titular head of the federal police force, donned an official jacket and inspected a checkpoint on the Bavarian-Austrian border – coincidentally 100km from his home constituency of Weilheim.
Television cameras rolling, Dobrindt announced that the federal police had, in the previous week on all borders, turned back 739 people – 45 per cent more than the week before. Of 51 people who sought asylum, he said, 32 were turned back.
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Such rejections are possible due to a new interpretation of Germany, he said, refusing entry if there are indications that another state is responsible for carrying out asylum procedures. By refusing entry, rather than perform a quick asylum check, Germany has set aside EU law by citing an emergency situation.
Dobrindt said this was justified given “an overburdening of local authorities, going back years, in their housing, health and welfare systems”.
Critics accuse him accusing him of chasing headlines and inventing legal justifications that courts may soon overturn.
In particular the European Court of Justice has thrown out invocations of the same emergency provisions many times in the past, most often from Hungary.
For one thing, German asylum applications in the first quarter of 2025 were down by half compared to the same period a year earlier. That reflects a wider drop in irregular arrivals across the EU. In the first four months of 2025, compared to the same period a year earlier, the number of irregular entries dropped one quarter to about 47,000.
European migration commissioner Magnus Brunner attributes the drop to “increased engagement with partner countries outside the EU” and member state co-operation.
But Germany’s unilateral move to impose checks on all its borders, dating in its original form back to September 2024, has infuriated Germany’s immediate EU neighbours, in particular Austria and Poland. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) agreed in coalition talks to a CDU/CSU demand of increased border checks but, party co-leader Lars Klingbeil says “there is no national emergency, we are not going to do any solo runs and will act within EU law”.
Citing tactical concerns, Germany’s federal border police declined to provide details of its new orders, or whether it is facing an emergency. A police spokesman told The Irish Times: “Clearly vulnerable people – such as women with small children or pregnant people, clearly seriously ill – can, as before, be passed on to reception centres.”
With all staff, reserves and assets activated, senior police officers concede the current push cannot last long. Government sources are hoping the new regime will hold until September, and that a hard rhetorical line combined a visible border presence will deter traffickers and defuse a charged political atmosphere on the migration issue.
This, Dobrindt and Merz say, is a more certain way of countering the recent AfD popularity surge than calls for an outright ban.
As part of efforts to outlaw the AfD, outgoing interior minister Nancy Faeser left Dobrindt a 1,100-page report by the domestic intelligence agency that, it said, proved the AfD was a “guaranteed extreme right” party.
After reading the report, largely a compendium of media reports and political rally remarks of AfD politicians, Dobrindt said it had “nothing to say” on whether the party demonstrated a real and present danger to the rule of law and democratic order.
“For a ban it is not enough,” he said.
Now focused on doing political battle, the first polls since the Dobrindt plan went live show the CDU/CSU has pulled up to three points ahead of the AfD.
