Friedrich Merz’s remarks on migration and women’s safety reveal a wider political tactic: using fear for women as moral cover for anti-immigration and nationalist agendas. This “politics of protection” exploits selective empathy, diverts attention from real threats to women, and substitutes symbolic fear for genuine safety policy, writes Dr Nina Jörden.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has faced intense criticism in recent days for remarks on migration that many saw as echoing far-right narratives. He argued that although progress had been made on migration policy, “this problem still exists in the cityscape” — a formulation widely interpreted as shorthand for visible ethnic and cultural diversity in Germany’s urban spaces. When pressed to clarify, Merz doubled down at a press conference: “Ask your daughters,” he said, implying that concerns about women’s safety justified a harder line on immigration.
It was a revealing moment. Under pressure from the rising Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Merz reached for a familiar script: invoking women’s safety to legitimise a harder line on immigration. The gesture was not accidental; it taps into a deeper current in European politics, where the language of protection, especially of women, is increasingly used to promote a political agenda.
The racialised character of this kind of rhetoric has been much discussed. Less examined is the political logic that makes it so effective. Concern about women’s safety works as an unusually powerful political currency because it uses an apparent appeal to the rights of all women as cover for a particular concern. Unlike other emotions mobilised in politics, such as anger, envy, or resentment, fear about women’s safety feels protective rather than opinionated. It allows leaders to moralise policy choices while presenting them as instinctive and apolitical: who, after all, could object to keeping women safe?
But this appeal has never been about all women. The “daughters” invoked in such debates are rarely migrant women, single mothers, or those in precarious work. Instead, the politics of protection tends to centre on a narrow, respectable femininity: women imagined as citizens, consumers, and symbols of national virtue. As scholarship has discussed, the politics of “saving women” has long been selective. Campaigns for women’s protection in the West often assume that some women — typically white, middle-class and culturally familiar — are in need of safeguarding, while others are framed as either victims of their own “backward” cultures or as potential threats to liberal values. This hierarchy of empathy reinforces a moral boundary around the nation: concern for women becomes a way of defining who counts as part of “us”.
That is what makes it so politically useful. It fuses moral outrage with cultural anxiety and offers the appearance of action, while diverting attention from the structural failures that actually endanger women’s safety.
The politics of protection
Social scientists have been documenting this dynamic for years. The sociologist, Sara Farris, calls it “femonationalism”: the selective use of women’s rights language to advance nationalist or anti-immigration agendas. The aim is not to protect women, but to protect a cultural boundary — “our women” against “the foreign men”.
The feminist scholar Elizabeth Bernstein has observed a related trend in the United States: what she calls “carceral feminism”. Here, genuine concern about violence against women is channelled into more policing, more surveillance, and more imprisonment — often harming the very communities most vulnerable to abuse.
In both cases, moral concern for women becomes a vehicle for expanding the state’s coercive powers.
The Cologne template
Germany has been here before. After the 2015–16 New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne, in which hundreds of women were harassed in the crowd, political discourse shifted dramatically. As researchers later showed, the episode was reframed as a story not about police failure or urban management, but about migration. Within weeks, it was being used to justify stricter deportation laws and a new “homeland security” narrative.
That sequence — moral panic turning into symbolic framing and then into policy escalation — reflects what political scientist John Kingdon terms the multiple streams approach to policymaking. Public concern, policy ideas, and political opportunity each flow through government separately, often with little connection to one another. But when a vivid emotional story — such as “our daughters are unsafe” — suddenly dominates the headlines, it can bring those streams together. A problem gains definition, a ready-made solution — like mass deportations — is attached to it, and the political climate rewards action over evidence. The result is the opening of a “policy window” in which fear becomes not just a sentiment but a governing logic. Merz’s remarks are an almost perfect illustration of that logic.
Fear as a shortcut
The political attraction is obvious. Fear personalises complex problems: it transforms structural failures into moral dramas with clear villains and victims. In policy terms, it collapses the distinction between what feels true and what is effective. Fear also serves a bridging function. It reaches voters who might be wary of stringent anti-immigration policies but may respond to appeals wrapped in safety, care and family.
For a leader like Merz, under pressure from the far-right AfD, that is a seductive shortcut — a way to occupy the moral high ground while borrowing the emotional grammar of populism. His Christian Democrats, disillusioned by a disappointing election result and polling that now shows the AfD level or ahead, are struggling to hold a line between rejection and imitation. Merz insists that his “firewall” against cooperation with the AfD remains intact, yet his rhetoric increasingly moves on its terrain: casting migration as the source of public disorder, appealing to cultural homogeneity, and presenting toughness as moral responsibility.
This dynamic is not unique to Germany. Recent research on political discourse shows that when mainstream parties face pressure from the far right, they rarely just respond to it, instead they help to redefine the boundaries of what counts as “mainstream.” By echoing or reacting to far-right themes, even in order to contain them, they shift the political centre itself, gradually legitimising ideas and language that once lay at the margins.
A failure to listen
When women are asked directly, their concerns look far more complex than the political rhetoric suggests. Recent EU-wide surveys show that young women want the EU to prioritise issues such as rising living costs, access to social services and healthcare, education, climate change and gender equality. By contrast, men are more likely to name defence, migration and border control as key issues for the years ahead. In other words, young women’s anxieties tend to focus on social protection and the sustainability of everyday life rather than on security in a narrow, law-and-order sense.
The debate also obscures an uncomfortable truth. For many women, the most dangerous place is not the street but their own home. Across the EU-27, one in three women (30.7%) report having experienced physical or sexual violence or threats over their lifetime. Nearly one in five (17.7%) have been abused by an intimate partner, and almost the same share by someone else within their household.
Yet despite its scale, domestic violence remains largely absent from political debate — unsurprisingly so, given that it is less visible, harder to instrumentalise, and entangled with broader questions of inequality, economic dependence and social policy. Merz’s framing is therefore not only patronising but profoundly ineffective: it diverts moral urgency toward symbolic threats while leaving untouched the everyday structures that sustain violence.
An effective policy programme around women’s safety would focus on behaviours, not identities — on prevention, policing and prosecution; safe transport and urban design; education that addresses male violence. It would mean funding shelters and legal aid rather than demonising particular groups of men. Above all, it would mean listening to women, not speaking for them.
Merz is right that restoring “security in public space” is vital to rebuilding trust in mainstream politics. But he has mistaken the cause for the cure. Public trust will not return through moral panic or symbolic action. It will return when political leaders stop treating women’s safety as an alibi for other agendas, and start treating it as an end in itself.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
