Germany’s right-wing AfD demands deportation of 1M refugees

In a heated debate in the German parliament, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said that voters had backed a radical shift to curb mass immigration by delivering a landslide win for her party in Sunday’s election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

“You declare the migration crisis over. Yet every year hundreds of thousands of migrants enter the country through the asylum back door, most from Muslim tribal cultures,” she said.

“And in Germany more than one million refugees live whose asylum applications have been rejected more than once,” she continued. “What are these people still doing in this country? They belong deported.”

Weidel also alleged that mass migration has made streets less safe and crime more prevalent, citing sexual and violent offenses, knife attacks, and disorder in public spaces. She further claimed that some foreign groups harbor hatred toward Christians, Germans, and Germany, and that about three-quarters of recipients of Germany’s basic income support for jobseekers were foreigners or had a migrant background.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking after Weidel, rejected her account as detached from reality and stressed the contribution of migrants to the German economy. Millions of people with a migrant background work in the skilled crafts, he said, and every sixth employee in that sector holds a foreign passport.

“If those migrants who work in Germany have to leave the country because of your ‘remigration’ plans, then the skilled-trades sector in Germany can no longer function,” Merz said. “Then not a single care home will work anymore, then not a single hospital in Germany will work anymore, then not a single restaurant will be able to run in Germany.”

He accused the AfD of stoking fear and dividing society. “What you are propagating here, namely remigration, is nothing other than ethnic cleansing by skin color and origin — nothing else,” he said.

Merz said his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the governing coalition distinguish between immigrants who work, contribute and have become part of Germany, and foreigners with no residence status and no right to stay, who should be returned. He defended the government’s line of curbing irregular migration and sending back those whose claims have been rejected.