Interior ministers of Germany’s federal states are set to meet on Wednesday, and there is one topic on everyone’s minds: What to do with some 700,000 Syrian refugees now that the civil war has ended and the country is relatively stable again?
As some might recall, the swift deportation of Syrian refugees was one of the main campaign promises of Chancellor Merz and his center-right CDU ahead of the 2025 February elections.
Fifteen months later, Germany is still just discussing the question, with the two old establishment parties within Merz’s grand coalition having wildly different takes on it.
CDU ministers, desperate to regain the trust of their voters and stop them from switching over to the nationalist AfD, are pushing for the implementation of Merz’s campaign promise and finally beginning large-scale reexaminations and returns.
Interior ministers of the Socialist SPD, however, argue that Syrians are “sustainably integrated, especially through employment, school or vocational training, and social participation,” and propose to create a new legal framework to provide indefinite residency permits to all Syrians—even those who didn’t get asylum and who currently reside in Germany illegally.
In reality—and in contrast to the SPD’s reasoning—Syrians in Germany remain one of the least integrated large migrant communities, with an unemployment rate currently estimated at 53%. Even among those who arrived over ten years ago at the height of the 2015 migration crisis, employment barely reaches 60%, significantly below the national average of 71%.
That’s why the CDU, after promising a major shift in the country’s immigration policy but failing to do much in more than a year, is now pushing back against the SPD proposal. Hessian Interior Minister Roman Poseck, leading the effort for more deportations among the CDU-led states, made it clear that Germany’s asylum system is not an immigration system waiting to be abused, even if that’s essentially what it was for the past decade.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Germany’s largest establishment party. It’s been steadily losing support ever since winning last year’s election with 29% (its worst performance since 1949), and by now, polls show it might have lost its edge over the nationalist AfD forever. Current aggregates put the AfD at 28%, with the CDU trailing behind at only 22%—pointing toward a possible AfD victory next time around.
Chancellor Merz’s approval rate is even worse than his party’s. Surveys show Merz as one of the world’s most unpopular leaders with just a 19% approval rate, second only to French President Emmanuel Macron (18%) in the EU—supposedly the two most powerful men in Europe.