Voters in the eastern German state of Brandenburg will vote on Sunday for a new regional parliament. The anti-immigrant far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, could win the most votes. On September 1, the AfD won its first major German election, coming first in the eastern state of Thuringia. In Brandenburg, polls show the AfD leading with 28 percent.
In a bid to undermine support for the AfD, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s left-wing government on Monday introduced checks on migrants at all of Germany’s borders. He also wants to increase deportations of people who have not applied for asylum. Conservative opposition parties, meanwhile, want the borders to be closed to asylum seekers altogether.
This is a very different country from 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,” she famously said.
In 2015 and 2016, Germany took in about 1.5 million refugees and migrants, mostly from the Middle East. They were greeted at train stations with signs reading “welcome” and smiling volunteers handing out food and toys. A new German word was invented, “Willkommenskultur,” or “welcome culture,” and many Germans suddenly felt proud of the country’s new identity as a refugee haven.
Today, many of those refugees are becoming German themselves. A record 200,000 people became German citizens in 2023. The largest group came from Syria. These are the New Germans.
The “Generation 2015” is described by experts as highly motivated. Many could have stayed in Lebanon and Turkey, but have gone to Germany to build a new life. They are on average younger than the native-born population – 26 years old compared to the German average of 47 – and statistically more likely to be employed: 84% of Syrian men who arrived in 2015 are employed, compared to 81% of German-born men.
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 are now coming to Germany, with a 22% drop in new arrivals this year compared to the same period in 2023. But a total of 3.48 million refugees are now living in the country — more than at any time since the 1950s. A third are from Ukraine.
Some local councils say they are struggling to make ends meet logistically and financially. The right and the AfD say the numbers are too high. The left points to the Finance Ministry’s obsession with balancing the books and its refusal to take on new debt. Add to that a massive increase 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 has done little to make voters feel more secure in the country’s leadership.
How do the New Germans feel about this changing mood in Germany?
Parvin was among those who arrived in 2015, walking for months, mostly from Afghanistan to Germany with her three-year-old son and disabled nephew. They were shot at by border guards and she feared for her life as the overcrowded rubber dinghy they were in began to sink in the Mediterranean.
She has just received her German citizenship and graduated as a social worker this summer. A success story for refugees, you might think. But she says the atmosphere for migrants has gotten worse since 2015. “I don’t feel welcome here,” she tells me.
“The rise of the far right and the hatred towards refugees is mainly due to the bad image of refugees in the German media,” she says. “If one 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 began in August, after a stabbing attack in the city of Solingen left three people dead. The suspect was a Syrian asylum seeker whom authorities wanted to deport. The following week, several knife attacks occurred across Germany that did not involve refugees — including two separate stabbings in Berlin in which women were murdered by their ex-partners. These cases did not make headlines.
The far-right AfD immediately used the stabbing in Solingen as part of its election campaign for the regional elections in Thuringia in September. Two hours after the attack, AfD regional leader Björn Höcke, who is legally defined as a fascist by German courts and has been fined for using a Nazi slogan at rallies, posted “vote for change on 1.9” next to the hashtag Solingen on X.
In Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, I meet Sultana, who is organizing a protest against the far right. She fled Afghanistan to Germany ten years ago, when she was 10 years old. She is now about to start studying law at university, speaks German at a native level and is politically active, often at large demonstrations. But she cannot vote. She has applied for German citizenship, but is still waiting for an answer.
Sultana’s mother Latifa tells me she’s terrified that after rebuilding their lives here in Germany, the family might have to flee again, this time to escape the far-right.
“We are very scared and we know that we are being threatened. But you have to understand that this has been the reality for years,” says Sultana, adding that the problem is not just the AfD, but the racism that she and many others experience on a regular basis.
“I speak German, I dream German, my whole life revolves around being German. I wonder what else I have to do to be recognized as German,” she tells me with tears in her eyes.
For Sultana, the answer is to become even more politically active. “We have no choice. Many migrants do not have citizenship and therefore no right to vote. But we have voices and we want to take these voices onto the streets and say: we are here and we are staying here!”
But other New Germans are thinking about leaving altogether. Once she had 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 even thinking about moving to the UK. She tells me she felt more welcome there.
A study published last week by DeZIM, an institute that researches migration, found that almost a quarter of people with a migration background, many of whom are German citizens, are considering emigrating 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 deter people from coming, but also drive away those driven New Germans who are already making successful lives here.
Damien’s documentary on the New Germans will be broadcast on BBC World Service and will be available to listen to here.
