Chancellor Friedrich Merz has a simple message for many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who found sanctuary in Germany during their country’s long and brutal civil war: It’s time to go back to Syria.
In reality, it will be hard for Merz to compel a large share of the roughly one million Syrians living in Germany to leave. But under pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose leaders vow to forcibly return Syrian refugees en masse, the chancellor is taking a harder line on Germany’s Syrian population, and says he’ll work with Syria’s president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, to do so.
“The civil war in Syria is over,” Merz said earlier this week. “There are now no longer any grounds for asylum in Germany, which means we can begin repatriating people.”
Merz’s comments reflect his latest push to move his conservatives sharply to the right on the AfD’s signature issue of migration. Until now, the broad strategy doesn’t appear to have worked, with the AfD only rising in popularity and coming in slightly ahead of Merz’s conservatives in many recent polls.
Merz is seeking to undo the legacy of one of his conservative predecessors as chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose generous asylum policies — particularly during the refugee crisis of 2015 — made Germany the prime European destination for Syrians and other migrant groups fleeing war and poverty. During Merkel’s tenure and beyond, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fled to Germany. Aside from Ukrainians, Syrians constitute the largest group of refugees now living in the country.
Merz blames Merkel’s migration policies for enabling the rise of the AfD, now the largest opposition party in the German parliament. Over the summer, Merz said his conservatives were “trying to correct” Merkel’s past policies. His pledge to repatriate Syrians is one of his most direct efforts yet to do so.
It also echoes similar recent efforts of his government to establish contact with Taliban officials to arrange deportations of Afghans living in Germany, beginning with those convicted of crimes. Human rights groups have sharply criticized those plans, saying returnees may be subject to harsh punishment and persecution in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Merz on Monday said he had invited al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaida member, to Berlin in order to discuss deportations of Syrians convicted of crimes. Merz also suggested that Syrians in Germany have a duty to return home to rebuild their war-torn country.
“Without these people, reconstruction will not be possible,” Merz said. “Those in Germany who then refuse to return to the country can, of course, be deported in the near future.”
‘They must be deported, with force’
Merz’s deportation threat belies a far more complex reality on the ground.
In the several years that many Syrians have lived in Germany, a large number have found jobs and become citizens. Some 287,000 Syrian citizens were working in Germany last year, and about 83,000 became German citizens.
Despite the tough rhetoric, Merz has not said he will forcibly repatriate Syrians outside of those who have committed crimes — at least not yet. His government’s strategy for now appears to be to incentivize others to depart of their own accord.
But his government may also choose to model steps taken in the 1990s, when some 320,000 Bosnians came to Germany, fleeing the Bosnian War. By the next decade, Germany had repatriated most of them.
Yet experts say conditions in Syria are not stable and secure enough to allow for many of the millions of Syrians who have fled the country to return anytime soon. This is a point Merz’s own foreign minister and fellow conservative, Johann Wadephul, seemed to make during a visit to the ruins of a destroyed city near Damascus last week, where he said it would be hard for many Syrians to promptly return.
“I have never personally seen such extensive destruction,” Wadephul said. “I could not have imagined it either. It is truly difficult for people to live with dignity here.”
Those comments sparked pushback from within Merz’s conservative ranks as well as among far-right politicians. Germans had rebuilt their country after World War II, some argued — and now Syrians should do the same.
“Germans also lent a hand, especially a large number of women, to rebuild the cities destroyed after World War II, so that cannot now be used as a fundamental argument to say that it is impossible to return to this country and rebuild it,” Stephan Mayer, a conservative parliamentarian from Bavaria told German newspaper Welt.
The right-wing debate around Wadephul’s comments seems to have forced Merz to contradict his foreign minister and take a harder stance on Syrian repatriations — though it remains to be seen how far his government will really go, particularly as Merz is governing in coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose members advocate a softer approach. SPD leaders, in fact, praised Wadephul for what they saw as his realism on the matter.
That’s one reason it will be hard for Merz to outcompete the AfD on his new tough-on-migration turn. AfD leaders, from a comfortable perch in the opposition, are taking a maximalist position, depicting Syrians in Germany — hundreds of thousands of whom continue to receive basic income support — as a unnecessary drain on German taxpayers for which only Merz’s conservatives can be held responsible.
“We say quite clearly: Syrians must now have their protected status revoked because the reason for their fleeing no longer applies,” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said on Tuesday. “These people must return to their homeland,” she went on. “If they do not leave voluntarily, they must be deported, with force.”
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