On Sunday, voters in the eastern German state of Brandenburg will vote for a new regional parliament. The far-right anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, could win the most votes. On September 1, the AfD won a major German election for the first time, coming first in the eastern state of Thuringia. In Brandenburg, polls show the AfD in the lead with 28%.
To undermine support for the AfD, the left-wing government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz introduced checks for migrants at all of Germany’s borders on Monday. He also wants to increase deportations of people whose asylum applications are unsuccessful. Meanwhile, opposition conservatives want the borders to be closed to asylum seekers.
This is a very different country to Angela Merkel’s Germany. Almost a decade ago, the then chancellor refused to close the borders to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution in Syria and Afghanistan. “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can do it,” he famously said.
In 2015 and 2016, Germany took in around 1.5 million refugees and migrants, mostly from the Middle East. They were greeted at train stations with signs saying “welcome” and smiling volunteers handing out food and toys. A new German word was coined, “Willkommenskultur” or “welcome culture”, and many Germans were immediately proud of the country’s new identity as a safe haven for refugees.
Today, many of those refugees have become Germans. A record 200,000 people became German citizens in 2023. The largest group came from Syria. These are the new Germans.
The “2015 generation” is described as highly motivated by experts. Many could have stayed in Lebanon and Turkey, but they moved to Germany to make a new life. They are on average younger than the native population – 26 years compared to the German average of 47 – and statistically more likely to work: 84% of Syrian men who arrived in 2015 are employed, compared to 81% of men born in Germany.
But with the rise of the AfD and an increasingly harsh tone towards migrants in mainstream politics, the “welcome culture” of 2015 is hard to find today.
Fewer refugees have now arrived in Germany, with new arrivals this year by 22% compared to the same period in 2023. But overall 3.48 million refugees are now in the country – more than at any time since 1950s. A third are from Ukraine.
Some local councils say they are struggling to cope logistically and financially. The right and the AfD say the numbers are too high. The left blames the finance ministry’s obsession with balancing the books and its refusal to take on new debt. Add this to a huge boost in military spending after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and there is a nervousness in Germany that money and resources are tight. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s argumentative and divided coalition government did not help voters feel more secure in the country’s leadership.
So how do the New Germans feel about this change of mood in Germany?
Parvin was one of those who arrived in 2015, traveling for months, mostly on foot, from Afghanistan to Germany with her three-year-old son and disabled grandson. They were shot by the border guards and she feared for her life when the overcrowded boat they were facing in the Mediterranean.
Now he just received his German citizenship and this summer he qualified as a social worker. A refugee success story, you might think. But she says the atmosphere has gotten worse for migrants since 2015. “I don’t feel welcome here,” she tells me.
“The rise of the extreme right and the hatred towards refugees is mainly because of the bad press of refugees in the German media,” he says. “When a refugee does something bad, the media makes it really big. And then, of course, people think that all refugees are bad.”
The latest political debate on migration started in August, after a stabbing in the city of Solingen, in which three people were killed. The suspect is a Syrian asylum seeker whom the authorities wanted to deport. The following week saw several knife attacks across Germany that did not involve refugees – including two separate stabbings in Berlin where women were killed by their ex-partners. These cases did not hit the headlines.
The far-right AfD immediately used the Solingen dagger in its election campaign for the regional elections in Thuringia in September. Two hours after the attack, AfD regional leader Björn Höcke, who was legally defined by the German courts as a fascist and fined for using a Nazi slogan at demonstrations, posted on X ” vote for change on 1.9″ with the hashtag Solingen.
In Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, I met Sultana, while organizing a demonstration against the extreme right. She fled to Germany a decade ago from Afghanistan, when she was 10 years old. She is now going to university to study law, speaks German at the level of her mother tongue and is politically active, often addressing large demonstrations. But he can’t vote. She has applied for German citizenship but is still waiting for an answer.
Sultana’s mother, Latifa, tells me that she is terrified that, after rebuilding their lives here in Germany, the family might have to flee again. This time, to escape the extreme right.
“We are incredibly afraid and we know that we are threatened. But you have to understand that this has been the reality for years,” says Sultana, and adds that the problem is not only the AfD, but the racism that she, and many others, experience regularly .
“I speak German, I dream German, my whole life revolves around being German. I wonder what I have to do more, to be recognized as German,” he tells me with tears in his eyes.
For Sultana the answer is to become even more politically active. “We have no choice. Many of the migrants do not have citizenship, and thus do not have the right to vote. But we have a voice and we want to take these voices to the streets and say: we are here and we will stay here!”
But other new Germans are planning to leave altogether. As soon as she got her German passport, Parvin was finally able to visit her sister in London for the first time, in August. Now that she is a qualified social worker, she is also considering moving to the UK. She tells me that she felt more welcome here.
A study published last week by DeZIM, an institute that studies migration, found that almost a quarter of people with a migration background, many of them German citizens, plan to emigrate because of the rise of the far right . Almost 10 percent say they have concrete plans to leave Germany.
The paradox is that the government is desperate to attract workers to Germany. But the increasingly hostile rhetoric about migration may not only discourage people, but also alienate those new Germans who are already leading successful lives here.
Damien’s documentary on the New Germans will be broadcast on the BBC World Service and will be available to listen to. here.
