If you want the policies of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), you can also vote Green. That is essentially the core message of Robert Habeck’s 10-point plan “Security offensive for Germany,” which was presented on Monday. In it, the Green party’s candidate for chancellor calls for an expansion of attacks on refugees and fires up the right-wing agitation against migrants that has been running on all channels for weeks and dominates the campaign for this month’s federal election.

In the introduction to his plan, Habeck writes:

We must increase security in the country for everyone—with or without a history of migration. ... The security authorities need the personnel, the technology and the powers to apprehend violent criminals, track down terrorists in good time and uncover attack plans. A security offensive also includes steps to further reduce and limit irregular migration.

What is being sold here as “security in the country for all” is typical right-wing law-and-order jargon. Just like the AfD, Habeck is also deliberately exploiting the attacks by foreign perpetrators for propaganda purposes in order to create a mood of insecurity and fear of allegedly violent refugees.

In fact, the proposals concern stepping up the repressive powers of the police state against the entire working class. The aim of this is not “security for all,” but the security of the elites against a storm from below. At the same time, workers’ discontent is to be directed against refugees so that it does not affect the actual perpetrators of the social crisis—the rulers and shareholders.

The Greens are thus reacting to the mass protests against the shift to the right that have erupted since the Christian Democrats (CDU) joined forces with the AfD in the Bundestag (parliament). Their response is not to turn their backs on the right-wing CDU leader and former Blackrock supervisory board chairman Friedrich Merz, but to throw themselves around his neck.

Habeck’s plan literally states: “Such a broad security offensive must be negotiated among democrats—not with right-wing extremists and not under the threat of cooperation with right-wing extremists. My hand was and is outstretched for talks.”

What the CDU wants to realise together with the AfD, could just as easily be achieved with the Greens, Habeck offered bluntly. With help from the self-declared “democrats,” basic democratic rights can also be undermined without getting your fingers dirty with the AfD fascists. In this way, the Greens also hope to be able to better control resistance to the shift to the right.

In the 10-point plan, which Politico has published in full online, Habeck proposes several measures for stepping up the state’s repressive powers: an “enforcement offensive” for over 170,000 outstanding arrest warrants in Germany; “more powers for the security authorities,” including automated data analysis and biometric facial recognition on the internet for the Federal Police and Federal Criminal Investigation Office; more personnel, modern technical equipment and powers for the Federal Police; and “a duty of cooperation for the federal and state authorities,” which would lead to even closer integration of the security agencies.

“All asylum procedures must be drastically accelerated,” according to Habeck. At the same time, he is calling for asylum seekers to be tested for mental illness during their initial medical examination in order to recognise supposed “potential risks” at an earlier stage. In reality, this creates another means of sorting out and deporting traumatised and mentally distressed war refugees at an early stage.

“Non-German dangerous persons” are to be deported “consistently” by cooperating better with the countries of origin—i.e., with the often criminal regimes from which the people have just fled.

The Greens want to curb the arrival of refugees primarily by expanding Fortress Europe. An “effective containment of irregular migration at the EU’s external borders” should take place by “immediately implementing” the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS).

Adopted by the EU bodies in May 2024, CEAS means the de facto abolition of the right to asylum. The hermetic sealing of Europe’s external borders is intended to result in refugees undertaking their asylum procedure outside the EU in closed, militarily guarded detention centres.

“Enforce European law” is another point in Habeck’s plan. He advocates tougher action against EU states that do not follow the Dublin rules. According to these regulations, which were not introduced to protect refugees but to ensure their rapid return, the countries where refugees first set foot on EU soil are responsible for them, i.e., border states such as Greece and Italy, not Germany.

In the last point, the Greens call for more “migration agreements” with the countries of origin in order to deport refugees and instead attract “urgently needed skilled workers and labour.” These perfidious agreements primarily serve the ruling class to bring selected migrants into the country who can be exploited at low labour costs and poor working conditions.

Although the aggressive Green “security offensive” is ostensibly directed against migrants, it must be understood as an attack on the entire working class. The real background to this offensive is the military build-up that the government must push through at the expense of working people and against their will.

Economics Minister Habeck, who recently even called for a tripling of military spending, and his party colleague Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock have been at the forefront of the hated pro-war and austerity policies of the coalition government with the Social Democrats (SPD) in recent years.

The Greens combine arrogance and hypocrisy with open contempt for the working class. They represent the interests of the wealthy upper-middle classes, who in the past adorned themselves with empty phrases about “peace,” “human dignity” or “diversity,” but today shamelessly and provocatively implement a policy of frenetic rearmament of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), increasingly repressive measures at home, mass layoffs and attacks on migrants.

Habeck himself aptly summed up his hostility to the working class in a play “Neunzehnachtzehn” (“1918”), about the Kiel sailors’ revolt at the end of World War I. Written with his wife Andrea Paluch, Habeck glorifies the right-wing SPD politician Gustav Noske, who dubbed himself the “bloodhound.”

During the November Revolution of 1918, Noske, in alliance with the generals, had the rebellious sailors and soldiers bloodily suppressed and the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht murdered. “Someone has to be the bloodhound,” Noske himself had said. He became Minister of the Reich Army and mobilised the far-right Freikorps against strikes and uprisings.

In his 2008 play, Habeck not only chose this bloodhound as his hero, but also openly declared in an interview with the Deutschlandfunk Kultur programme that he saw himself in Noske. Habeck ranted that Noske’s “passing the reins” between revolution and order was a “metaphor for the daily grind as the Green federal chairman.” He said he had incorporated his own political experiences into the play.

Habeck’s 10-point plan exudes the spirit of Noske. As minister of economic affairs, Habeck is one of the main people responsible for the social misery that exists in Germany today. Now he is trying to direct the growing anger towards the weakest: refugees. And he is signalling to the ruling class that he is prepared to suppress the opposition against social cuts, fascism and militarism, if necessary, with brutal police state methods.