Abstract
In 2015, more than one million refugees arrived in Germany in what was broadly called the refugee crisis. In the weeks following the refugees’ arrival, an unprecedented wave of support swept across the country that came to be known as “Willkommenskultur,” a culture of welcoming (Laubenthal 2019, p. 418). The perception of broad German approval of refugees’ arrival in the country was intensified by media coverage (Haller 2017; Dostal 2017). Migration quickly became the most dominant political issue in the country, reaching its peak in the second half of 2015 when in some polls, almost 90% of respondents identified migration as the number one political problem (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen 2019).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Indicators “immigration positive” (number 602.2) and “immigration negative” (number 601.2).
- 4.
According to Alonso and Fonseca, the law and order indicator in particular comes with some tradeoffs: “The problem with this issue category is that some of the matters it covers have little or nothing to do with immigration, such as the organization and funding of police forces. Including ‘law and order’ in our issue dimension may thus inflate the relevance of immigration in manifestos. Excluding it, however, may have the opposite effect of not capturing immigration in one of its fundamental framings by the parties, namely law and order. We rather take the risk of inflating the saliency score of immigration for some parties than of not fully grasping their takes on the issue” (Alonso and Fonseca 2011, p. 871).
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A series of sexual assaults occurred during the New Year’s celebration in Cologne in 2015/2016. The assaults were mainly conducted by male refugees. Given the sheer number of incidents, law enforcement was not capable of controlling the situation for hours. In the aftermath, 1222 criminal offenses were reported, 513 of which cited sexual violence (Werthschulte 2017). The German Interior Minister at that time, Thomas de Maiziere (CDU), described the events as the turning point in the debate on migration and refugees, after which a different approach would be necessary. See online: www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/thomas-de-maiziere-nennt-koelner-silvesternacht-wendepunkt-a-1118162.html.
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See online at: https://dbk.gesis.org/dbksearch/index.asp?db=e.
- 7.
See online at: http://www.bamf.de/EN/Startseite/startseite-node.html.
- 8.
The scores for the years 2001–2017 are taken from the longtime measurement of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (2019) available at: http://www.forschungsgruppe.de/Umfragen/Politbarometer/Langzeitentwicklung_-_Themen_im_Ueberblick/Politik_II/#Probl1.
- 9.
To reduce imbalances between both scores, the score for the number of asylum seekers is reported in the thousands. For example, this will change the original number of 743,000 in 2016 to 743.
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Hornig, EC. (2021). The German Parties’ Reaction to the 2015 Refugee Crisis—A Long-Term Analysis of Party Positioning Dynamics. In: Chu, CP., Park, SC. (eds) Immigration Policy and Crisis in the Regional Context. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6823-1_10
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