Germany’s Merz wants Syrian refugees to go home
Baku, November 6, AZERTAC
Under pressure from the far right, Germany’s chancellor says his country will begin repatriating Syrians. The reality is more complicated.
According to Politico EU, 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.
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’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.
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