“There was a before and an after”, Angela Merkel wrote on the first page of her memoirs, referring to the moment in the summer of 2015 when she decided “not to turn away the refugees”. Looking back, the former German Chancellor saw her welcoming hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers into Germany “as a caesura”. She was right: it was indeed the watershed moment that would define her legacy. More than that, though, it was a choice that defined Germany’s future.
Almost exactly 10 years have passed since 24 August 2015. On that day, the German government, headed by Merkel, suspended the so-called Dublin Protocol, which stipulates that asylum seekers must be processed in the EU country they first enter. It was a response to the waves of refugees coming into Europe, fuelled by the Syrian civil war, and which were overwhelming bureaucratic systems across the bloc. Especially in light of her country’s Nazi past, Merkel felt she had no choice but to act on what she called a “humanitarian imperative”. Germany’s decision effectively made it legal for anyone to enter Germany, so long as they said they were claiming asylum.
According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, nearly 1.1 million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015 alone. For context: that number was 25 times higher than in 2011. Syrians made up the single largest proportion that fateful year, at 40% of the total, but they were not the majority. Other people from the Middle East, mostly Iraqis and Afghans, but also from the Balkans and North Africa, comprised the remainder. Nearly 70% were male.
A year later, the centre-left newspaper Die Zeit looked back on the night of 4 September, when Merkel decided to fully open the borders and bring asylum seekers in on trains, as “the night Germany lost control”. For one thing, the liberal journalists lamented, “the government admits that not a single refugee who arrived on that weekend or in the days that followed was screened by security officials.” Germany had no idea whether it was admitting children from war-torn Aleppo — or terrorists and sex offenders. Over the next decade, Germans swiftly discovered that they had opened their gates to all of these and more.
The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”
The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs”. When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.
In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up”. Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.
The same poll, from January 2025, showed that 68% of people wanted Germany to take in fewer asylum seekers. The problem was that while Merkel was chancellor, all the way up to 2021, there was no effective way for this majority to express their scepticism at the ballot box. The architect of the refugee policy hogged the centre-right slot on the political spectrum. The other parties sat further to the Left. Even Christian Lindner, the leader of the small libertarian FDP, called Merkel’s decision “right and justifiable”.
Merkel understood this dynamic. In 2015, she tried to frame the influx as a temporary crisis that the country had to overcome together. “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”), she famously told her compatriots. By December, however, she admitted at a party conference that “even a strong country like Germany would in the long run be unable to cope with such a large number of refugees”. In March 2016, the EU duly struck a deal with Turkey to return migrants and show domestic voters something was changing. Yet with the German political establishment reluctant to change, the intake continued. Today, there are at least 3.3 million asylum seekers in Germany: some 4% of the population.
The majority that worried about the numbers was never going to stay silent forever. With Merkel defending what was essentially a Left-wing migration policy while leading the major centre-right party, a powerful vacuum emerged for a more radical alternative. It was filled by a political newcomer: the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD.
In December 2015, Alexander Gauland, a leading figure in the AfD then as now, called the migration crisis a “gift” and “very helpful” to his then two-year-old outfit. He was right: the AfD, which started on a libertarian platform but is now focused on immigration, first entered the German parliament in the election of 2017 with 13% of the vote. Today, it is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Recently, it has even topped some polls, with around a quarter of the electorate supporting it.
The meteoric rise of the AfD is a direct response to German immigration policy since 2015, with many here feeling their country has changed irrevocably — and without their consent. Take crime. Official police statistics say 42% of suspects are foreign nationals. Even if you discount being in the country illegally, that still leaves 35%.
Such statistics have come in for criticism. One study, released earlier this year, found that “migration and asylum have no systematic impact on criminality”. But many people feel and see unwelcome change in their immediate environment. This summer, sexual harassment and assault of women and girls in German lidos have triggered a heated debate. In June, one case made the headlines when girls aged 11-16 reported to have been groped by four Syrian men. According to figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office, there were 423 sexual crimes reported in public swimming locations last year; nearly two thirds of suspects were non-Germans.
One can attack the veracity of those statistics: but what’s certain is that Germans feel less safe. In a survey taken last year, only a little more than half of people said they felt safe in public spaces. Two years earlier, it had still been 75%. This is likely also connected to a number of high-profile violent crimes and acts of terrorism committed by men who came to Germany as asylum seekers. This began with the Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 in which 12 people were killed by an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia who had entered Germany during the refugee crisis in 2015. From there, the grim reports have continued, from a mass stabbing at Solingen, in August 2024, to the shocking story, in Aschaffenburg, of an Afghan asylum seeker who stabbed a toddler to death earlier this year.
No doubt, radicalisation and psychiatric issues played a role in all these cases. But that won’t make people feel any safer. The fundamental problem remains that asylum seekers weren’t checked, with the government’s focus being on their safety and not that of the German public.
Beyond the questions of safety, meanwhile, Merkel’s experiment has transformed German life in other ways. Politicians have constantly stressed that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working. Nonetheless, the sheer numbers admitted since 2015 make integration difficult both for them and the rest of the country. Nearly half of benefits claimants in Germany are non-nationals. Often this is due to bureaucratic hurdles as well as language and culture barriers. Regardless of the reasons, seven-in-10 Germans think the state is “overwhelmed”.
People see this in their everyday lives. On average, 30% of school children now have what Germany calls a “migration background”; in some places, notably in certain parts of larger cities, it’s 80% or more. Apart from language issues in overstretched classrooms, this has a bearing on culture too. Some schools have switched to Halal-only food in canteens. In Berlin, a gay teacher was abused by children for years. At his primary school, where 95% of students come from migrant families, he was told he would “go to hell” and that “he was a disgrace to Islam”. Some kids boycotted his lessons. His complaints to school and city authorities remained ignored until he took them to the media.
This cultural shift is visible right across Germany. After the October 7 attacks, Hamas supporters celebrated on the streets of Berlin, handing out sweets to passers by. For obvious historical reasons, the connection between antisemitism and immigration in Germany is a highly sensitive and contested field, but existing figures suggest that there is a link. In 2020, a study found that 40% percent of Muslims in Germany held antisemitic views; the same was true for just 5% of Protestants.
To quote Merkel herself, then, “there was a before and an after”. Germany has changed forever and there is no turning back the clock. But that still leaves the future. The current German government under Friedrich Merz — a long-term inner-party rival and critic of Merkel — is attempting a two-step approach to move forward. On the one hand, it is implementing stricter immigration policies. National border controls have been reinstated, and family reunification rules have been suspended for certain asylum seekers. Though there are a number of reasons behind this trend, Germany has seen a 50% decline in asylum applications in the first half of 2025.
The second, and much more difficult, step will be the integration of recent arrivals who are likely to stay in Germany. The case of a school in Ludwigshafen in western Germany has triggered a debate on how the children of immigrants can be better supported to integrate into German society. There, nearly all students are from non-German backgrounds while a quarter of them lack the required basic skills to advance to the next grade. Education Minister Karin Prien has put the idea of an imposed “migration quota” for schools on the table to distribute children who don’t speak German and those lacking other required skills, such as holding a pen or being able to sit in a chair for extended periods. But she received immense criticism for this, and the debate over integration rages on.
Visible reforms are important for voters to feel that a line has been drawn under Germany’s unlimited approach to asylum. Had Merkel followed her initial instincts, when she argued that opening the gates was the only way out of a once-in-a-generation crisis, many Germans would likely have forgiven her. After all, they came out in droves to feed, house and support genuine refugees. The problem came with the abdication of control. The borders remained open, and the lines between asylum policy and general migration were blurred. Arguments around labour shortages, demographic imbalance, and cultural diversity were all introduced, as though Germany only had two choices: no immigration or uncontrolled immigration.
What is clear is that the current German government will have a hard time tackling the problems Merkel unleashed. Yet, as the AfD rises and cultural divisions widen, the 10th anniversary of her decision may be the last chance for the German establishment to look back, take stock, and finally change course.
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Author: Katja Hoyer
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