“We achieved a great deal and reduced the number of refugees from August 2024 to August 2025 by 60 percent, but our cities still face a challenge in their public appearance. For this reason, the Interior Minister is working to make large-scale deportations possible.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, October 2025
“The Chancellor spoke plainly about what everyone can see at train stations in Duisburg, Hamburg, and Berlin: neglect, drug dealers, and groups of young migrants, mostly from Arab and Muslim countries… This is the result of irregular migration.”
Jens Spahn, Head of the CDU parliamentary group, October 2025
Was this a slip of the tongue or a calculated statement by Germany’s “stubborn” Chancellor, as biographer Daniel Goffart once described him? Germany is asking itself this question and debating with unusual intensity why the head of government of Europe’s largest country, together with the head of his party’s parliamentary bloc in the Bundestag, would choose language that many consider provocative and racist. Their remarks blended, deliberately or otherwise, symptoms of migration challenges with their causes, sweeping millions of people into a single frame: Arabs, Muslims, and others, yet targeting precisely those migrants who do not fit the conservative German right’s notion of the “ideal citizen.”
Because Germany is diverse, whether its Chancellor appreciates that or not, the country did not remain quiet. From the first day the statements were made, spontaneous demonstrations spread across dozens of cities, accompanied by initiatives, open letters, and criticism even from within the CDU. Opinion pieces in major newspapers accused Merz of racism, of splitting society, and of putting more than a quarter of the population under suspicion.
Why then would Merz burn his fingers on matters smaller than the remit of a Chancellor, a man who has spent two thirds of his life in politics and knows the corridors of business and power in Berlin?
Is he merely provoking millions and fishing in troubled waters? Is he attempting to stir stagnant debate?
Or, as some argue, is he seeking partisan advantage by wooing voters of the far-right Alternative for Germany, while trying to stem the outflow of conservative and cross-party voters toward a movement whose central platform is agitation against migrants, especially Muslims?
One fact is clear: the AfD has been rising in the polls and, since the federal election earlier this year, competes for first place. It is preparing for five state elections later this year and the next.
According to the latest ARD poll, the race for first place is tight: Merz’s CDU sits at 27 percent, the AfD at 26 percent, while Germany’s oldest party, the SPD, is given just 14 percent.
What happened?
On 14 October, a journalist reminded the Chancellor of a 2018 pledge to cut the AfD’s popularity in half. What is your plan, and how will you solve the problem of the AfD’s surge, he asked?
Merz did not hesitate. He immediately praised his Interior Minister for reducing refugee numbers by 60 percent. Yet, he said, the job is unfinished. Completing it depends on addressing what he described as a problem with the appearance of some German cities, which he linked to certain refugees, without naming nationalities, and which he argued requires intensifying deportations.
But why does the Chancellor connect the far right’s popularity to refugee numbers? Do the government’s own figures not show that arrivals began dropping before his administration took office in early May?
Indeed. Data from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees confirm that numbers declined markedly from 2023, with a 54.7 percent decrease in new arrivals that year. This suggests that the credit lies with the previous government under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, not with policies introduced by the current Merz cabinet.
The task of specifying nationalities was left to Jens Spahn, the CDU’s parliamentary leader, who asserted that city centres would look better without migrants from Arab and Muslim countries and from Eastern Europe.
The next day, Merz handed Spahn the microphone. Spahn’s star had risen less than a decade ago, and his anti-Muslim statements once extended to proposing special laws for Muslims, even telling them to bathe naked in fitness studios.
“In the gym I go to, signs were posted allowing people to shower in swimwear. Many muscular Arab men were ashamed to shower naked. This indicates a societal change I do not want.”
Jens Spahn in an interview with the conservative Die Welt, 30 July 2016
Whether Spahn intended it or not, his call for laws specific to Muslims, who number about 5.5 million in Germany, fuels one of the most harmful myths about Islam: that Islam is not a religion but an ideology.
He did not state this outright, but he understands that pushing the slander further is a task others readily take up, particularly the AfD, whose leaders Alexander Gauland and Beatrix von Storch have claimed Islam is nothing but an ideology. Such rhetoric emboldened Germany’s largest tabloid, Bild, to declare in an article: “It is not only said that the AfD considered Islam an ideology. In reality, Islam is merely an ideology.”
Following Merz’s comments and their reinforcement by his parliamentary leader, a journalist asked whether the Chancellor would apologise. He replied: “I repeat. Those who observe daily life know my statements last week were accurate (…) Once again: ask your children, ask your daughters, ask within your friends and acquaintances. Everyone confirms there is a problem, at least after dark.” He explicitly linked the “appearance of cities” to his government’s aim of accelerating deportations.
To decide whether this was a slip or calculated language, we need to look back at earlier Merz statements.
2023: “We are largely talking about young men from the Arab region. They are unwilling to respect the law and enjoy challenging the state (…) I am talking about Arab migrants who behave like pashas.”
(In German, “Pascha” carries a negative connotation, suggesting a lazy man demanding service from others.)
2024: “We are discussing a complex issue. But we must ask why the Islamic Centre in Hamburg remains open. What is happening in Quran schools? What is happening in mosques in Germany? We have more than 1,000 of them. The state must examine this.”
2023: “… refugees crowd dental clinics and have their teeth replaced, while Germans cannot get appointments.”
These quotes, made while in opposition, drew public anger at the time, but because Merz was not in office their impact was softer than the shock that followed his recent remarks about “disfiguring” city spaces.
Why did Merz not learn from earlier criticism? Does repetition indicate his willingness to risk his party’s reputation in order to halt the AfD and lure its voters? Or does hostility to migrants, particularly Muslims, reflect a deeper ideological current within him and his conservative party? And how did these words land with the millions of migrants, Arabs, and Muslims who make up over a quarter of Germany’s population?
Reproducing the image of the migrant
Karima Ben Ibrahim, Director of the Documentation and Information Centre Against Racism, considers the Chancellor’s word choice politically “highly problematic.” In linking what he called the “appearance of cities” to migration, she argues, Merz consciously or unconsciously reproduced right-wing and racist narratives about migrants. Such phrasing collapses very different groups into one pot: refugees, people with migrant backgrounds, and religious or ethnic minorities. It recasts the migrant as a source of social disruption. This is dangerous, she told Al Jazeera, because it substitutes racialised stereotyping for analysis of structural causes.
Dr Johannes Kies, an expert on the far right at the University of Giessen, like many in academia, began assessing the Chancellor’s underlying motives as soon as the statements appeared.
“On the one hand,” he told Al Jazeera, “the Chancellor’s initial remarks align with AfD talking points. On the other hand, the second wave of comments was marked by arrogance and obstinacy, seemingly aimed at hardening the CDU’s right-leaning profile, at a moment when the party is deeply strained over migration.”
Will such statements stop the AfD and bring back voters the CDU has lost in recent months?
Kies is blunt: no. The evidence shows these debates typically strengthen the AfD, because it monopolises migration issues and claims ownership regardless of how other parties calibrate their tone. Voters, in such scenarios, choose the original rather than the imitation. More troubling, he adds, is that these controversies produce losers all around, intensify fear and disgust toward democracy, and drain political debate of substance instead of directing it toward solutions.
25 million with a migration background
Federal Statistics Office data show that 24.9 million of Germany’s 83.5 million residents are German citizens with a migration background. According to the same office, the number of refugees officially obligated to leave the country stands at 41,000. Even if, hypothetically, every single one of them were responsible for “disfiguring” city centres and train stations, they would represent just 0.07 percent of the populations of Germany’s larger and mid-sized cities.
How did migrants and the broader public respond?
When Merz limited himself to vague references about a “spoiled urban image,” the initial backlash was mostly confined to media and segments of the elite. But once his parliamentary leader specified nationalities and the Chancellor doubled down, refusing to apologise and urging sceptics to “ask your daughters,” the streets erupted. Under slogans like “We are the city’s image” and “We are the daughters,” protests, initiatives, and open letters showcased the country’s diversity.
Ben Ibrahim notes that the outrage did not come only from people of migrant background. Many migrants rightly saw the remarks as racist, yet responses also poured in from opposition figures, members within the governing coalition, civil society organisations, and political leaders across the spectrum. The common denominator was alarm: this style of rhetoric widens the gap between law-and-order policy and social reality. The issue is not denying problems exist, but how they are addressed in language and media. Are they described with precision and care, or through sweeping generalisations that stigmatise entire communities?
“He insulted us all”
To understand how such language lands, consider an unusual migrant voice. A quick search of Nader Khalil’s name yields articles praising his decades of work bringing neighbours together in Neukölln, a diverse district of South Berlin. The Berlin Senate has honoured him repeatedly, including with the Integration Medal in 2007.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Khalil says that in everyday life Merz’s words imply that anyone not of “pure” German origin is a suspect, despite Germany’s broad acknowledgment that migrants helped rebuild the country after the war and continue to be pivotal in every economic sector.
Recent Federal Statistics Office data support Khalil’s point. Some industries in recent years have survived only because of migrants, who constitute up to 60 percent of the workforce in certain sectors, and 26 percent of the overall labour market in Europe’s largest economy.
Khalil, who ran for the Bundestag in 2009 on the CDU ticket, accuses Merz of contradiction: on the one hand the Chancellor calls for social cohesion, on the other he hammers wedges into the social fabric.
How did people in Neukölln react?
“With sarcasm,” he says. A Turkish-German friend joked: “Should we dye our hair blond to match the Chancellor’s idea of Germany’s cityscape?” Another said he was unsurprised, because such remarks show a leader living in a parallel world, detached from the realities of Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg.
For Khalil, the gravest danger is that such language normalises the far right and sets the stage for its deportation agenda should it reach power, especially when the rhetoric comes from the very top of government.
Impacts and risks
Analysing the immediate effects of this discourse, Ben Ibrahim identifies three direct harms to relations between migrants, Muslims, and other Germans. First, when leaders speak of the “appearance of cities,” the public imagination quickly fills with stereotyped images of central stations, city hubs, and groups of non-European-looking youth. Complex issues like poverty, unemployment, and weak infrastructure are reduced to a shallow visual debate that feeds prejudice and sidelines objective analysis.
Second, such language breeds marginalisation and suspicion. Many citizens with migrant backgrounds, including Muslims, feel their belonging is perpetually questioned. That erodes trust in public institutions, a trust essential for integration policy and social cooperation to succeed.
Third, the rhetoric shifts debate away from social justice toward symbolic and linguistic skirmishes. The problem is not raising difficult issues but the vocabulary chosen. When language becomes a tool of stigmatisation rather than a means of careful analysis, it produces distrust and fractures the social fabric.
Language is not neutral
Ben Ibrahim, whose centre is a key reference point for the German government on anti-racism, urges the Chancellor to ground official communication on migration in sound data and clear reasoning, to avoid generalisations, and to strengthen integration through work. She calls for immediate access for new residents to language and vocational programmes within 30 days, fast digital recognition of professional qualifications, and open labour-market pathways.
She emphasises the rule of law applied fairly to all, along with partnership agreements linking Islamic associations, migrant organisations, schools, local businesses, and housing providers. Clear targets should be set, such as expanding vocational training opportunities, increasing women’s participation in language and employment, and reorienting housing and social-care policies. These reforms are indispensable if the Merz government truly seeks social cohesion, rather than issuing racially charged statements that chiefly benefit the far right.
In her view, today’s political language is itself a political actor. Words can build belonging or dismantle it, reinforce cohesion or threaten it. The shift from symbolic, simplistic rhetoric to comprehensive, practical policy is a necessary first step toward a cohesive and plural society.
Does the German Chancellor recognise that only by acknowledging diversity as a structural value, and by adopting participatory, fact-based policies, can Germany sustain peaceful coexistence and social justice in its cities?
