Ever fewer people are applying for asylum in Germany, according to data issued by the Interior Ministry on Sunday, which put first-time applications at 113,236 in 2025.
That figure is less than half the 229,751 applications registered a year earlier and almost a third of the 329,120 asylum requests filed in 2023.
A report by Bild am Sonntag newspaper put the combined number of first-time and follow-up applications at 168,543, a decline of around 33% from 351,915 in 2023.
Follow-up applications can be filed if circumstances have changed after the initial claim was withdrawn or rejected.
Experts cite several reasons for the steady decline in asylum seekers, including border checks introduced from October 2023 under the previous government and intensified this year under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The fall of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad in late 2024 has also led to a decline in the number of Syrians seeking asylum in Germany.
In Italy, a more restrictive migration policy is thought to have curbed the number of arrivals, with knock-on effects for Germany, while the reverse is said of Spain, where irregular migrants with job prospects have better chances of securing legal status.
The Interior Ministry in Berlin ascribes the changes to a turnaround in German migration policy, characterized by rejections at the borders, a refusal to take in family members, the scrapping of fast-track citizenship applications and an increase in migrant returns.
“The clear signal from Germany, that migration policy in Europe has changed, has reached the rest of the world,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said in a statement to Bild am Sonntag.
He said the government was taking a clear and consistent approach to migration.
“Those who have no claim to protection should not come; those who become offenders must leave,” Dobrindt said.
According to the ministry, deportations rose by around 20% last year. Since January 1, there have been new deportations to Afghanistan of people who committed crimes in Germany.
Discussions between Germany and the Taliban on deportations of offenders to Afghanistan are “well advanced,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Thursday.
In a debate in the German parliament, Dobrindt said “technical discussions” recently took place in Kabul with employees from his ministry.
“I want to tell you that these talks are well advanced and we will continue along this path consistently,” the minister told lawmakers in Berlin. “Criminals have no place in Germany. We will regularly deport them to Afghanistan.”
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s administration has pledged to step up deportations since taking office in May.
Contacts with the Taliban are controversial, as the German government does not officially maintain diplomatic relations with the Islamist organization, which returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
The group is internationally isolated due to its disregard for human rights and women’s rights in particular.
Since 2021, Afghan criminals have been deported from Germany on two occasions with the help of Qatar.
According to Dobrindt, one issue in the Kabul talks was whether it would be possible to regularly deport people to Afghanistan using scheduled flights as well as chartered ones.
German conservative lawmaker Alexander Throm raised the question whether dual citizens convicted of terrorist acts on German soil should face easier revocation of their citizenship, following the arrest of three suspected Hamas operatives.
Currently, German law allows citizenship to be stripped if someone joins a foreign terrorist organization, Throm told the Handelsblatt business newspaper. “There is no reason why this should not also apply to terror acts committed in Germany,” he said.
The three suspects, including a naturalized Lebanese-born man and a naturalized Syrian-born man, were arrested in Berlin on Wednesday and are scheduled to appear before a judge on Thursday.
Authorities say they acted as foreign operatives for Hamas, procuring an assault rifle, pistols and ammunition from Germany. The weapons were allegedly intended for attacks on Israeli or Jewish sites in Germany. They are said to have been procuring firearms and ammunition since at least the summer of 2025.
Hamas denied any connection, calling the claims baseless and an attempt to “harm the movement’s reputation and distort the German people’s sympathy with our Palestinian people.”
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said a terrorist suspect known to security authorities with links to Hamas had entered the country several months ago. It had been unclear who, or which event or facility, the planned attacks were targeting.
German authorities may revoke the citizenship of dual nationals involved in terrorist activities abroad to prevent their return and reduce potential security risks, as they fall outside the reach of the domestic justice system.
Individuals engaged in such activities within Germany, however, remain subject to prosecution and punishment under the country’s criminal laws.
The human rights commissioner of the German government, Lars Castellucci, has called on the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Office to expedite the admission of vulnerable Afghan men and women from Pakistan.
He wrote on the platform X on Friday that the government coalition had agreed on an orderly and humanitarian migration policy. The lengthy examinations in the case of the Afghanistan admission programme fulfil neither, he added. Castellucci argued that those who want to curb illegal migration must simultaneously open legal pathways.
Time is pressing due to deportations
Castellucci demanded that those who have received a legally binding promise of entry to Germany through the Federal Admission Programme for Afghanistan must also receive their visa “promptly.” He said that time is pressing in light of deportations from Pakistan to Afghanistan.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt stated that each case would be examined to determine whether there is a legally binding obligation to admit. He also said that a security check would be conducted.
This concerns Afghans who are considered at risk because they have advocated for democratic rights or once worked as local staff for the German Armed Forces or German organizations. These people, along with their family members, have an admission promise from the previous coalition government.
Since the German embassy in Kabul has been closed since Afghanistan was retaken by the Islamist Taliban in 2021, they are undergoing the examination process in Pakistan.
BERLIN — Germany’s center-right opposition wants to raise the heat on Chancellor Olaf Scholz by launching a parliamentary investigation into his alleged connection to a massive tax evasion scandal.
The case — which dates back over five years to the time when Scholz was still mayor of the Hamburg city-state — is linked to the broader so-called “Cum Ex” affair, under which the German state was defrauded by over €30 billion as some banks, companies, or individuals claimed tax reimbursements from authorities for alleged costs that never occurred.
The scandal already hung over the Social Democratic politician’s election campaign in 2021 but had little impact in the end as Scholz’s potential involvement remained unclear. Now it is heating up again after new details emerged that put his previous defense in question.
The Hamburg regional parliament plans to summon Scholz this spring — which will be for the third time — to an investigative committee looking into the scandal. And now the center-right CDU/CSU bloc also wants to set up an inquiry at the national level in the Bundestag.
“We will request a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Scholz-Warburg tax affair in the German Bundestag in the first parliamentary week after the Easter vacations,” said the CDU’s Mathias Middelberg, deputy parliamentary group chairman, on Tuesday.
A government spokesperson said that “as a matter of principle,” Berlin does not comment on decisions announced by Bundestag members “out of respect for the constitutional body,” according to media reports.
Katja Mast, the Social Democrats’ chief whip, said the CDU/CSU is not following any interest in knowledge, but rather party tactical interests. “They bring up allegations that have long been refuted,” she said, adding that the committee in Hamburg had clarified all questions.
The CDU/CSU group has enough votes in parliament to be able to set up an investigative committee. The Left party also said it would back such a request. Parliamentary investigative committees can hear witnesses and experts and request access to documents. Although the findings are summarized in a non-binding report, the political consequences, such as for upcoming elections, could be significant.
In a letter to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group seen by POLITICO, chairmen Friedrich Merz and Alexander Dobrindt said that the case should be investigated due to its “significant” importance for German national politics.
Scholz has come under scrutiny because of his links to one Hamburg-based bank involved in the tax evasion scheme: During his time as mayor, he met on three separate occasions in private with one of the owners of the M.M. Warburg & Co. bank, which was already under investigation at the time by the Hamburg tax office. Officials were planning to reclaim €47 million, which they believed were ill-gotten gains in connection with the fraud.
However, in the end, the finance authority let the statute of limitations on the payment demand expire — and years later, after details of Scholz’s meetings with the banker emerged, critics began questioning whether the top Social Democrat might have intervened in favor of the bank.
Although the chancellor has constantly denied having intervened, he has also given no answer on what was discussed during the private meetings. Instead, Scholz said on several occasions during the past two-and-a-half years that he cannot remember the content of the discussions.
During his time as mayor of the Hamburg city-state, Scholz met with one of the owners of the M.M. Warburg & Co. Bank, involved in a tax evasion scheme | Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images
That defense is now being called into question as details emerged of a previous and longtime confidential Bundestag committee hearing with Scholz in July 2020, in which he appeared to easily remember details of his meetings with the banker. His critics argue that Scholz only started to claim having no memory of the meetings when their political and possibly criminal explosiveness became clear.
“This comprehensive memory gap of the chancellor after an initial memory of a concrete meeting … raises a multitude of questions to be clarified,” the letter from the CDU/CSU states.
Scholz and his allies have repeatedly rejected such criticism as politically motivated and stressed that past investigations found no wrongdoing. Scholz also highlighted that in the end, the bank did repay the €47 million, albeit only after it was ordered to do so by a court. The Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office said in March that it does not see any initial suspicion against the chancellor in the affair.
That hasn’t discouraged the opposition from planning to dig deeper, though.
“The chancellor would like to see … a line drawn under the clarification of this tax affair. But it is precisely the task of parliament to control the government, to look closely, especially with so many unanswered questions,” said CDU lawmaker Matthias Hauer.
