After the Austrian center-left coalition government became the first European country to deport a Syrian criminal earlier this week as part of a tighter asylum policy, Germany has now worked up the courage to do the same.
The German Interior Ministry announced on Saturday that it had instructed the federal migration office (BAMF) to take action against “dangerous Syrian individuals and delinquents,” a spokesman told AFP.
After negotiations with the junior partners in his—also center-left—government, Chancellor Friedrich Merz reached an agreement with the social democrat SPD that allows the country to deport Syrians as well as Afghans, starting with “delinquents and people considered a threat,” a spokesman said.
Those specific two ethnicities have been overrepresented as perpetrators of both violent crime and sexual assaults, according to official German statistics. In 2022, the country reported 11,500 rape cases, with an alarming 40% of perpetrators of Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi origin. More than 50% of violent crimes in Berlin are committed by foreigners, and a number of high-profile knife crimes, some with deadly consequences, have been committed by Syrians.
At the end of March, there were about 969,000 Syrians living in Germany, of whom 712,000 had some kind of asylum or temporary protection status.
Around 2,000 Syrians have applied for a voluntary return program, with about 800 already returned to their home country. Between January and May, Germany opened over 3,500 cases to review and potentially revoke asylum for Syrian nationals. So far, 57 lost refugee status and 22 lost subsidiary protection, the Interior Ministry said.
Both Austria and Germany are currently governed by so-called Frankenstein coalitions, where center-right parties have joined forces with left-wing parties. These unlikely alliances were formed primarily to keep right-wing populist parties from gaining power. However, by excluding those populist parties, the governing coalitions have also sidelined a significant portion of voters. As a result, the coalition governments have a strong incentive to at least give the impression that they are addressing major voter concerns—most notably, mass immigration, which was one of the top issues in recent elections in both Austria and Germany.
