Migrants say Germany’s ‘welcome culture’ has soured as far-right parties rise

On Sunday, voters in the eastern German state of Brandenburg will vote for a new regional parliament. The anti-migrant far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, could win the most votes. On 1 September the AfD won a major German election for the first time, coming first in the eastern state of Thuringia. In Brandenburg polls show the AfD leading with 28%.

To undermine support for the AfD, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s left wing-led government on Monday introduced checks for migrants on all of Germany’s borders. He also wants to increase deportations of people whose application for asylum is unsuccessful. Opposition conservatives meanwhile want the borders closed to asylum seekers altogether.

This is a very different country to the Germany of Angela Merkel. Almost a decade ago the then-chancellor refused to shut 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 around 1.5 million refugees and migrants, mostly from the Middle East. They were greeted at train stations with signs saying “welcome” and smiling volunteers handing out food and toys. A new German word was invented, “Willkommenskultur” or “welcome culture”, and many Germans were suddenly proud of the country’s new-found identity as a safe haven for refugees.

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 “2015 generation” is described as highly motivated by experts. Many could have stayed in Lebanon and Turkey, but pushed themselves on to Germany to make 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 in work: 84% of the Syrian men who arrived in 2015 are in employment, compared to 81% of German-born men.

But with the rise of the AfD and an ever harsher tone towards migrants in mainstream politics, the 2015 “welcome culture” is hard to find today.

Fewer refugees are now coming to Germany, with new arrivals down this year by 22% compared to the same period in 2023. But overall 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 cope logistically and financially. Right-wingers and the AfD say numbers are too high. Left-wingers blame the finance ministry’s obsession with balancing the books and refusal to take on new debt. Add that to an enormous boost in military spending after Russia’s full 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 not helped voters feel more secure in the country’s leadership.

So how do the New Germans feel about this shift in mood in Germany?

Parvin was one of those who arrived in 2015, travelling for months, mostly walking, 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 when the overcrowded dinghy they were in starting sinking in the Mediterranean.

She has now just received her German citizenship and this summer qualified as a social worker. A refugee success story, you might think. But she says the atmosphere has got worse for migrants since 2015. “I don’t feel welcome here,” she tells me.

“The rise of the far right and the hate towards refugees is mostly because of the bad picture of refugees in German media,” she says. “When 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 over migration started in August, after a stabbing in the town of Solingen, in which three people were killed. The suspect is a Syrian asylum seeker who the authorities had wanted to deport. The following week saw multiple knife attacks across Germany not involving refugees — including two separate stabbings in Berlin in which women were killed by their ex-partners. These cases did not hit headlines.

The far-right AfD immediately used the Solingen stabbing as part of its election campaign for September’s regional election in Thuringia. Two hours after the attack AfD regional leader Björn Höcke, who has been legally defined by German courts as a fascist and fined for using a Nazi slogan at rallies, posted on X “vote for change on 1.9” alongside the hashtag Solingen.

In Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, I meet Sultana, as she organises a protest against the far right. She fled to Germany a decade ago from Afghanistan, when she was 10 years old. She is now about to go to university to study law, speaks German to mother-tongue level and is politically active, often addressing large demonstrations. But she can’t vote. She has applied for German citizenship but is still waiting for an answer.

Sultana’s mother Latifa tells me that she is 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 incredibly afraid and we know we are being threatened. But you have to understand that this has been the reality for years,” Sultana says, and adds that the problem is not just the AfD, but the racism that she, and many others, regularly experience.

“I speak German, I dream German, my whole life revolves around being German. I ask myself what more do I have to do, to be recognised as German,” she tells me with tears in her eyes.

For Sultana the answer is to get even more politically active. “We have no choice. Many of the migrants have no citizenship, and so have no right to vote. But we have voices and we want to take these voices out onto the streets and say: we are here and we are staying here!”

But other New Germans are thinking about leaving altogether. As soon as she got 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 them 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 over migration may not only put people off coming, but also push away those go-getting New Germans who are already leading successful lives here.

Damien’s documentary on the New Germans will be broadcast on the BBC World Service and will be available to listen to here.