Germany's rising right eyes deportation drive for Syrians on short term asylum

Almost 50,000 seekers await fate as far right eyes historic wins and deportations resume to Afghanistan

The Alternative for Germany is aiming for the first far-right state election victory in post-1945 Germany in two contests on Sunday. Getty Images

After three people were killed in an Islamist knife attack in Germany, right-wing poster boy Björn Höcke wasted no time in updating his election message.

"The multicultural experiment that has been forced on the Germans must be stopped," he said, just hours after the stabbing in Solingen last Friday.

If the Syrian suspect, Issa Al H, had been deported, Mr Höcke subsequently said, the three victims "would still be alive today".

If polls are right, Mr Höcke's rhetoric is about to reverberate across Germany and Europe, with his Alternative for Germany party set for a historic win in state elections this weekend.

A flurry of deportations is on the cards as Chancellor Olaf Scholz tries to calm the populist anger. A charter plane to Kabul deported 28 Afghan migrants convicted of crimes on Friday, the first such flight since the Taliban seized power.

Syria looks set to be next. Mr Scholz wants to deport Syrians found guilty of serious violence. The centre-right opposition wants to turn away newly arrived Syrians too. Its leader Friedrich Merz says there are "people in Germany we don't want".

After rare face-to-face talks between Mr Scholz and Mr Merz, ministers announced a get-tough policy package including stripping asylum from refugees who holiday back at home. The government is "working at full speed" to work out how to deport people to Syria for the first time since 2012, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

The suggestion that Syria, or parts of it, could be classed as a "safe country" for refugees to return has alarmed campaigners.

"We have been witnessing a lot of continuing atrocities against civilians in Syria, especially on those returning," said Ranim Ahmed of The Syria Campaign, a human rights group.

"Considering parts of Syria as safe just to deport refugees is brutal and inhumane, with disregard to any human rights or basic rights of these refugees," she told The National.

Secure and insecure

Many Syrians have settled well in Germany. Most of those admitted during Europe's 2015 migration crisis were given full refugee status, which comes with a three-year residence permit. Many are now eligible for German passports. More than 75,000 Syrians took up German nationality last year after passing language and citizenship tests. Their status is secure.

But newer arrivals are typically in a weaker position. Most Syrians now receive a "subsidiary protection" that lasts only a year, with stricter rules on bringing their families. Out of 61,000 Syrians processed this year, only one in 14 was given full refugee status.

The subsidiary status kicks in when people have not shown that they are at "individual risk", said Winfried Kluth, a law professor who sits on Germany's Expert Council on Integration and Migration.

"You do not have to show that the [Syrian] state has, for example, something against your religion or your political opinions," he told The National. "In this case it is only the risk of the civil war and that you are probably in danger because there is a civil war."

This blanket assumption of danger is now in doubt. A German court last month rejected one Syrian's claim for protection, ruling that neither Damascus nor his home region of Hasakah were so dangerous that "merely his presence" would put him in peril.

Any wider ruling that Syria is safe could mean almost 50,000 Syrians currently in limbo are denied even the weaker form of asylum.

That is exactly what some German politicians want to see happen.

"There is no sensible reason any more for the government to give everyone from Syria automatic protection," said Joachim Herrmann, the conservative interior minister of Bavaria, as he called for the Afghan flight to be followed "swiftly" by deportations to Syria.

Whether Syria is deemed safe will depend in part on a secret "situation report" written by German diplomats. Last updated in February, it described continued fighting in all parts of Syria, as well as credible reports of torture and executions.

But this does not necessarily rule out deportations. Only last week, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock condemned new Taliban laws on women as "almost 100 pages of misogyny". At the same time, officials were secretly preparing deportations to Kabul.

Syrians denied asylum in Germany are often given an even shakier "toleration" status in which they have no leg to stand on except that deporting them is impossible for "legal or factual reasons". About 5,700 Syrians are currently in that club.

Germany is looking for ways to clear the jam but currently there is "no co-operation with the Syrian government", Prof Kluth said. Officials say there are discussions with "several countries", after the Afghan flight took place on Qatar Airways. Search powers have been widened to stop people giving immigration police the slip.

Ms Ahmed said refugees who return to a Syria deemed "safe" could find their homes bombed or confiscated. There have been cases of people being arrested and interrogated at the border when they return from Turkey or Lebanon, she said.

"The economic situation is not ready to receive a large amount of people coming back to nothing," Ms Ahmed said. "They lost everything when they left. How are they going back?

"Women and people who lost everything in the war while escaping from Syria are the most vulnerable, because so many families have lost their sole provider of the family."

Some Syrians have been returned to EU countries where they first arrived. Authorities had tried and failed to have the suspect in the Solingen attack deported to Bulgaria. After the stabbings there were protests calling for "remigration" of foreigners, and counterdemonstrations against the far right.

The focus for Mr Scholz's government is on deporting serious criminals, said his spokesman Steffen Hebestreit after the flight to Kabul on Friday. He said it was "not about people who were caught fare-dodging". But the right wants to go much further.

Election battle

Two states in former East Germany, the AfD's heartland, go to the polls on Sunday. Polls show the far-right party in the lead in Thuringia and a close second in Saxony. They were the AfD's two best states at the last federal election in 2021.

Mr Höcke, the party leader in Thuringia, is also the party's most polarising figure nationally, known for testing post-1945 taboos by toying with Nazi terminology. In May he was fined for using the slogan "Everything for Germany", made notorious by Hitler's SA storm troopers.

In Thuringia the AfD is promising a "Deportation Initiative 2025" using the states' powers to enforce immigration law. Although it was the chancellery in Berlin that negotiated the flight to Kabul, it was up to the 16 states to decide who was sent to the airport.

Mr Höcke's buzzword is "remigration" of foreigners, with Syrians and Afghans as a focus. He has called for a "demographic change" in Thuringia fuelled by a higher birth rate, another fixation that has invited comparisons to the 1930s.

Even if the AfD is kept out of power, by what would almost certainly be an unwieldy alliance of rivals that may lack a majority, a far-right victory would be a seismic result in post-1945 Germany and pile pressure on Mr Scholz to win back the disaffected.

The centre-right Christian Democrats, whose support would be essential in any coalition, are promising their own tough line on migration by pushing for asylum processing in third-world countries, an idea Mr Scholz is unenthusiastic about, and a "de facto stop" to asylum claims from Syria and Afghanistan.

What Ms Ahmed feels is missing is a willingness to address the crisis in Syria that lies at the root of the refugee crisis.

"Instead of focusing on deeming Syria safe, they should focus more on how to hold the regime and other parties accountable," she said.

"They should be committing to human rights, to protecting the right of refugees, the right of Syrians, to look at the root cause of the refugee crisis, instead of just punishing refugees for just coming for safety."