Thousands of people gathered in Berlin and other German cities after a parliamentary vote in which Friedrich Merz and the CDU/CSU worked with the far-right Alternative for Germany to advance anti-immigration legislation.
The event date is 2025-01-30. According to DW, the protests came one day after Merz helped push a draft immigration motion through the Bundestag with AfD support. That move outraged many citizens and political opponents, who saw it as a breach of a long-standing postwar norm against cooperation with extremist parties.
At CDU headquarters in Berlin, police estimated the crowd at around 6,000 people. That was more than the 4,000 expected, but below the 13,000 claimed by organizers. The demonstration was one of several across Germany, with large gatherings also reported in Dresden, where Merz was campaigning ahead of the February 23 election.
The row over the vote went beyond a single parliamentary maneuver. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Greens and a range of church and civil-society groups criticized the cooperation as a break with the lesson Germany says it drew from the Nazi era: that democratic institutions must not normalize extremist partners. The business-friendly FDP also backed the motion, underscoring that the issue cut across the traditional party map.
DW reported that the motion itself was non-binding and focused on restricting immigration. Even so, the political symbolism was explosive. Protesters under the banner “No Cooperation With the AfD” argued that Merz and the CDU/CSU had made the far right more socially acceptable. That accusation speaks to a deeper fear in German politics: that strategic cooperation on a vote can blur the line between tactical parliamentary majority-building and legitimizing extremist forces.
The demonstrations were not entirely calm. A group of roughly 30 to 50 people forced its way into a CDU district office in western Berlin, where furniture was reportedly vandalized and police later opened an investigation into trespassing and possible assembly-law violations. At the same time, the atmosphere outside the party headquarters was described as peaceful, and employees were sent home early because security services warned that safe departure might not be possible later in the evening.
The protest wave also showed how immigration had become one of the dominant issues before the election. Merz argued that he had been forced into an alliance with a party labeled extreme in part by intelligence services because of the need to pass tougher migration rules after another deadly attack by a man who should have been deported. Opponents saw the move differently, as an unnecessary and dangerous crossing of a moral line.
By the time the day ended, the message from the streets was unmistakable: for many Germans, the question was no longer just how to control migration, but whether the center-right was willing to pay too high a political price to do it.
The Berlin protests also revealed how quickly one parliamentary calculation can reshape the street politics around migration. Merz may have been trying to force a harder debate, but the immediate effect was to mobilize opponents who see any cooperation with the AfD as normalization. That tension is likely to follow the election campaign rather than disappear with a single vote.
