On Wednesday, the German conservatives of Friedrich Merz, who is expected to be the country's next chancellor, concluded a coalition agreement with the center-left German Social Democratic Party (SPD), BTA reports.
One of the main points in it is a strengthening of the German position on illegal immigration - a radically opposite position to the election-winning Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU), after former Chancellor Angela Merkel, a representative of the same political formation, opened Germany's borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants exactly ten years earlier.
"We will take a new course in migration policy. We will organize and manage it better, with the aim being to largely end illegal migration," Merz said at a press conference after announcing the coalition agreement, quoted by world agencies.
The future chancellor said that the new federal government would strive to limit the number of asylum seekers to no more than 100,000 per year, DPA reported.
"The strain on our cities, towns, schools, hospitals and infrastructure has reached a critical point," Merz said in an interview with AERD television.
He also confirmed his plans to suspend family reunification and launch a broad deportation campaign.
"Germany will suspend family reunification for many migrants, will designate more "safe countries of origin," the future chancellor said, quoted by the British newspaper. "Express".
Merz also pledged to introduce mechanisms to return migrants at the borders and added that coordination with neighboring countries on this issue is already underway. According to the new rules, asylum seekers will be denied entry at Germany's land borders.
The future coalition will also repeal part of the recent reform of German citizenship law, removing the possibility for some applicants to receive accelerated naturalization after just three years.
Germany will also start regular flights to deport migrants to Syria and Afghanistan, the "Times" noted. In return, countries that cooperate in curbing illegal migration to Germany and accept deportations will be rewarded with preferential conditions for visas, trade and development funding, under the coalition agreement that Merz struck with the SPD.
The decision has drawn criticism, as Berlin was until now the second-largest national donor of foreign aid in absolute terms after the United States.
"This is the wrong signal at the wrong time," said Lisa Dittlmann of the "One" campaign, a global development organization co-founded by Bono and Bob Geldof.
"Fenro", an alliance of 150 humanitarian aid groups in Germany, also condemned the aid cuts as short-sighted and "irresponsible". Its chairman, Michael Herbst, warned that Berlin risks undermining its influence outside the West, especially at a time when it is seeking to build strategic and commercial ties with the "Global South".
"This opens the door for autocratic regimes to secure ever greater influence in developing countries," Herbst said.
The issue of migration has caused heated disagreements since the election campaign, when the CDU promised to take drastic measures, the British newspaper recalls. "Telegraph".
Conservative negotiators have faced pressure from the centre-left Social Democrats to soften these measures, over concerns that they would be a clear breach of EU migration law.
On the one hand, the permanent closure of Germany's borders violates the European Union's right to freedom of movement - a long-standing cornerstone of trade, labour and tourism flows across the bloc's borders. Furthermore, the suspension of the right to political asylum runs counter to the Geneva Conventions, the Treaty on European Union and Germany's constitution. This right is of particular importance to Germany, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and others tried to flee the country during the Nazi era - only to have their applications rejected or their ships turned back and eventually perish in death camps, notes "Politico".
German political analyst Raphael Bossong said the promise to turn away asylum seekers en masse was "essentially incompatible with EU law" unless Germany declared a state of emergency on migration, which is unlikely. "In short, you would need the consent of neighbouring European countries (to return migrants) and even then it would not be about immediate return (to their homeland - ed.) - it would be more likely to speed up the process of sending people back to the neighbouring country," he added.
The latest figures show that asylum applications in Germany actually fell by around 30 percent in 2024 - a result of strict border measures introduced by Olaf Scholz's outgoing coalition. In 2024 Germany registered almost 230,000 asylum applications, about 100,000 fewer than the previous year, DPA reported.
But Merz's push to tighten German border security followed the unprecedented election result of the anti-immigrant, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which came in second place in February's election and is now the de facto opposition.
During the election campaign, Germany was also rocked by a series of terrorist attacks carried out by foreigners, including asylum seekers, just before the polls opened.
On January 29, Merz confronted the Social Democrat Scholz government on the issue of migration. In response to a knife attack, allegedly carried out by an Afghan asylum seeker, in which a two-year-old boy and a man were stabbed in Aschaffenburg, the CDU leader proposed a series of stricter border and asylum rules, some of which are even unconstitutional, Foreign Policy reported.
He also mentioned the bloody attack on December 20 in Magdeburg, when a 50-year-old Saudi doctor with permanent residency drove his car into a crowd at a Christmas market, killing at least five people and injuring hundreds.
In the Bundestag, the CDU and two smaller parties broke their own election promises by adopting the resolution - along with the AfD votes.
The vote in turn provoked a rare reaction from former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who redoubled her criticism of Merz, with whom they have often disagreed in the past, by saying that the CDU/CSU had crossed a red line by allowing a migration policy proposal with the support of the far-right AfD to be passed in the Bundestag, writes "Politico".
Asked if her open-door policy on migration was not responsible for the rise of the AfD, Merkel acknowledged that the migration dispute between the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, during her term in office had contributed to the growth of the far-right party. The Bavarians were pushing for stricter migration policies at the time after hundreds of thousands of asylum applications were filed in 2015. "It was not right that we argued so much", she admitted. However, Merkel rejected the idea that her leadership was mainly to blame. "When I left office, the AfD was at 11%", Merkel said. "Support for them by more than 20 percent is no longer my responsibility", she added.
In 2015, the then chancellor made headlines with the infamous phrase "Wir schaffen das" – "We'll do it", recalls the British newspaper "The Guardian". She uttered it on August 31, days after the bodies of 71 dead migrants were found in a truck abandoned in Austria. The discovery sparked international outrage and contributed to several countries deciding to open their borders to people fleeing war and poverty.
"The reason we approach these issues should be: "We have already dealt with so many things, we will deal with this too," Merkel said in an interview with German television, while headlines quickly appeared that Hungary was sending trains of people to the German border, 20,000 of whom showed up at Munich Central Station in the following week alone, the publication recalls.
The phrase Merkel used became so memorable mainly because in the weeks and months to come it would be endlessly quoted by those who believed that the German chancellor's optimistic message had encouraged millions more migrants to embark on a dangerous odyssey across the Mediterranean.
"Merkel's actions now will be difficult to fix: her words cannot be silenced," wrote the "Spectator." "She has exacerbated a problem that will be with us for years, perhaps decades," the publication noted.
The then and current US President Donald Trump described Merkel's opening of the borders as a "catastrophic mistake," and the far-right British politician Nigel Farage said it was "the worst decision a European leader has made in modern times."
Friedrich Merz, who took over as CDU leader from the former chancellor in 2021, also recently accused his predecessor, saying that Germany had had a "wrong asylum and immigration policy" for a decade, "Deutsche Welle" noted.