The Refugee Crisis in Debates of the German Bundestag: Discursive Frames and Political Contestation

The political management of the refugee crisis is the defining political challenge of the second Grand Coalition led by Chancellor Merkel. In addition to testing Germany’s commitment to European integration, the course of events also seemed to upset established party political constellations: the oppositional Green party appeared aligned with a Christian Democratic Chancellor and Social Democrats, while the main objections to the Federal Government’s policy were raised by the Bavarian CSU and Left Party. Has Europeanization finally become a transformative factor for German party politics? The paper approaches this question by combining the analysis of position data with the comparison of discursive frames used for the justification of policies during the crisis: whether the political response to migration is evaluated through arguments based on economics, cultural identity, security, humanitarian obligation or multilateralism in the context of the European Union. How were these discursive frames used in public debate about the refugee crisis in Germany, and how did it matter for the structure of political contestation between government and opposition parties, and the dimensionality of debate between political party representatives? The paper presents results from the empirical analysis of plenary debates in the German Bundestag through evaluative claims-making analysis, based on computer-based text coding. In addition to presenting a case study on one of the most pertinent EU-related debates in Germany, the paper will shed light on fissures in EU-related positions of parliamentary parties that has given way to the rise of a populist challenger party after the 2017 Federal Election.