In the extremely heated migration debate, it is not often that top politicians praise representatives of the competition. On the contrary: the FDP general secretary has just declared the Greens a “security risk” for the country. And the Greens have targeted the Union – also because of statements like Friedrich Merz’s about rejected asylum seekers in German dentist’s chairs. The reactions to an appearance by Karl-Josef Laumann are all the more astonishing.
The man has been on the CDU board for almost twenty years. He was parliamentary group leader in the Düsseldorf state parliament, has been head of his party’s workers’ wing since 2005, sat for the CDU in the Bundestag for 15 years – and is now labor minister in North Rhine-Westphalia. You can hardly have more CDU in your biography.
But it is precisely this Laumann that the deputy parliamentary group leader of the Greens, Konstantin von Notz, is now praising. “Laumann’s constructive, struggling and searching for common ground tone is the basis for jointly seeking and finding solutions to the major challenges in the area of migration,” says the Green. What has happened there?
On Friday, CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann invited people to a press conference in the Konrad Adenauer House. He wanted to promote the “active pension”, with which he would like to make working more attractive for pensioners. Linnemann had brought two men with him. A professor who wrote a report on active pensions. And Laumann – as Labor Minister, also an expert voice on this topic.
But then a journalist asked the labor minister whether he was observing the phenomenon Merz complained about in his state, namely that rejected asylum seekers were having their teeth remade at the state’s expense. And this was followed by Laumann’s six-minute answer, which the Green Konstantin von Notz and many others are now praising so much.
But what did Laumann say?
The minister has known Friedrich Merz for decades. And he is a loyal person – in the employee wing they sometimes criticize Laumann for being too cautious. At the same time, the trained machinist is seen as honest in politics. That’s why he has to squirm a bit at the beginning of his answer: How do I say that Merz is not right in his exaggeration without saying that Merz is not right?
“Well, the situation is that we are already overwhelmed by the systems,” says Laumann. But when it comes to “specifically dentists, I can’t tell you that we have a big problem there.” There are “no signs” of this. But “apart from the example of dentists,” it is “already the truth” that wherever he appears in North Rhine-Westphalia he is told: “We don’t know how to do it anymore.”
Laumann says there is an immigration of five to six thousand people per week in his state. And the refugee minister has to see how she can “manage it somehow – that’s becoming increasingly difficult for her.” It’s not just housing that’s missing. In North Rhine-Westphalia there are hundreds of thousands of children in schools that we couldn’t have known two years ago that they would be there. Of course, “every child is fond of and every child is loved.” And they will “do everything to ensure that they get a good daycare place and do well at school.”
“I think we in Germany are rightly proud of our right to asylum”
But teachers don’t live in trees, they can’t be found on the job market – and there aren’t enough rooms either. That’s why he thinks we have to say: “We have reached the limits of our capacities in many areas – and people are feeling that.”
As someone who has been in politics for a long time, the problem concerns him, says Laumann. “I think we in Germany are rightly proud of our right to asylum.” But “a good public mood for this right of asylum across the population will only be maintained if we are more successful in concentrating this right of asylum on those who were meant by it at the time – namely people who live in a situation where they – “for whatever reason – be persecuted.”
Other people who came to Germany “may have individually good reasons for being here – often certainly major poverty problems – but that is not covered by asylum law.”
In order to maintain acceptance “for the best asylum law in the world in Germany,” we must now come up with solutions “that ensure that our hospitality focuses very much on people who are truly persecuted.” He would be happy if all democratic parties would lead this debate together.
In the CDU – and this is not a given in these times – Laumann received cross-campaign support for this statement.
Laumann “wonderfully describes the core of a humanitarian, Christian democratic asylum and refugee policy, which equally wants to preserve the core of the right to asylum and the acceptance of the population,” wrote the deputy federal chairwoman of the CDU, Karin Prien, on the platform X. Prien is one of the harshest critics of the policy Behavior of the Thuringian CDU towards the AfD. But the Thuringian CDU leader Mario Voigt also praised Laumann. His statement is an “excellent explanation of Christian democratic migration policy”.
Emily Büning, the federal political director of the Green Party, then used Laumann’s appearance to give one to Friedrich Merz. What Laumann says gives “hope that there are still voices in the CDU that are not limited to divisive resentments.”