By Rachel More and Thomas Escritt
BERLIN (Reuters) -Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised Friedrich Merz, her successor as leader of the country’s conservatives, on Thursday for pushing through a bill on tighter immigration control with the help of the far right.
“I believe it is wrong,” Merkel said, referring to the outcome of a vote in parliament on Wednesday when a Christian Democrat motion was passed with support from the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), breaking a long-held political taboo in Germany.
Holocaust survivor Albrecht Weinberg, who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, returned his Federal Order of Merit medal to the German state in protest, while Michel Friedman, a Jewish community leader and member of the CDU’s presidency in the 1990s quit the party.
Berlin mayor Kai Wegener, a fellow conservative, also indicated dissatisfaction.
“With me – you can rely on it – there will never be cooperation or a coalition with the far-right,” he said.
Christian Democrat leader Merz, frontrunner to become Chancellor after the Feb. 23 election, rejected suggestions he had breached mainstream parties’ “firewall” against the AfD, saying his bill was necessary, regardless of who chose to back it.
In a rare intervention into domestic politics, Merkel accused Merz of going back on a vow he made in November to seek majorities with mainstream parties rather than with the AfD.
She urged “democratic parties” to work together to prevent violent attacks like those recently seen in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg. In both instances, the suspects had applied for asylum in Germany, bringing border and asylum policy into sharp focus in the election campaign.
The AfD, which is polling second in most surveys behind Merz’s conservative bloc, is being monitored by German security services on suspicion of right-wing extremism.
Thousands protested outside the CDU party’s Berlin headquarters on Thursday, prompting the police to urge staff to leave work early for their own safety, a party official wrote on social media.
Addressing a rally in Dresden, Merz told protesters they were over-reacting.
“The right to demonstrate only goes so far,” he said, adding that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens represented a “dwindling minority” in society.
The job of the conservatives, he said, was to ensure “a party like the AfD is no longer needed in Germany.”
(Writing by Rachel MoreEditing by Madeline Chambers and Christina Fincher)
