Time for Syrians to go home?

With Syria’s war formally over, Friedrich Merz says repatriation can begin. Yet a fragile coalition and an economy reliant on migrant labour make deportations politically combustible.

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

It is often forgotten that when Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders at the height of Syria’s civil war, she also set a deadline for when the Syrians who arrived would be expected to leave.

Speaking in early 2016, Merkel said: “We expect that once peace returns to Syria and ISIS is defeated in Iraq, you will return to your homeland with the knowledge you have gained here with us.” Syrians were welcome to learn the language and find jobs, but their stay in Germany was “temporary,” she stressed.

Ten years later, the conditions Merkel set for a return appear to have been met. ISIS has been all but defeated, its fighters killed, arrested or driven into the desert. Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has fled, leaving power in the hands of Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Islamist fighter. The year since Assad’s fall has seen parliamentary elections — but also sectarian massacres and gunfights between government loyalists and religious minorities.

Cities like Aleppo and Homs remain largely rubble. Still, the war is formally over. So, is now the time for Syrians to take the skills they acquired in Germany and return to rebuild their homeland?

That appears to be the position held by Friedrich Merz. Speaking late last year, he said that “the reasons for people to have asylum no longer exist, which means we can begin repatriating people.”

“A large proportion of Syrians want to return,” he added. “We will encourage this and we will also help the country to rebuild quickly.”

The CSU, the Bavarian sister party to Merz’s CDU, tried to push the issue last month, calling for the government to charter planes to fly Syrians home “as quickly as possible.”

But whether Syrians are itching to return home, as Merz seems to believe, is far from clear.

Surveys conducted in countries such as Lebanon and Jordan show that around 80 per cent express a desire to return home. Over a million have already done so. But those figures contain an irony. Despite sharing a language and culture, neighbouring countries have largely hindered integration, keeping refugees in camps and restricting their access to the labour market. People returning from a Lebanese refugee camp don’t have to fall that far.

Leaving Germany, by contrast, means leaping off a cliff. Here, refugees were offered a path to full citizenship in just five years. The government sought to employ Syrian doctors and other skilled workers, and invested billions in integration. Three quarters of Syrian men now make welfare contributions through their employment — a proportion broadly in line with German men. In many of these households, women continue to stay at home and care for children.

Among Syrians in Germany, there are certainly some who have not mastered the language and who may be waiting for their home country’s economic prospects to improve. For the majority, the prospect of prosperity, stability and voting rights is likely to mean that they want to stay. A financial incentive programme, offering up to €4,000 per family to return, is unlikely to change that equation. Since the civil war formally ended in December 2024, fewer than 4,000 people have taken up the offer.

If Merz is serious about repatriating Syrians, his government will have little choice but to use compulsion. He has intimated that he is willing to do so. “Those who refuse to (voluntarily) return to their country can, of course, still be deported in the future,” he warned.

Advocates of robust repatriation policies point to the 1990s, when Germany took in 350,000 refugees from the wars in the Balkans. Following a 1995 peace deal, Germany swiftly enacted a deportation plan, starting with single people and childless couples before expanding it to families and even traumatised individuals. Cut off from welfare and the labour market, most Bosnians left before enforcement intensified. By the early 2000s, just 30,000 remained.

That remigration programme unfolded against a backdrop of race riots and the rise of an insurgent party on the right. In Baden-Württemberg, which took in the most refugees per head, the hard-right party Die Republikaner won more than 10 per cent in state elections. Bosnians protested against their deportations. But the CDU, then in power, pushed through its policy out of fear that failing to act would weaken its grip on right-wing voters.

Today, the rise of the AfD shows that anxiety about belonging has once again intensified. Headlines about migrant crime and welfare abuse once again influence the public mood. Polling shows that two thirds of Germans want Syrians to go home, even if they have to be physically deported. This time around, the pressure isn’t just domestic. The United States, Germany’s most important strategic ally, has pressed Berlin to return to citizenship policies based on European heritage — a position reinforced by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Munich at the weekend.

Yet there are major differences between the 1990s and today.

The 1990s were marked by mass unemployment. Today’s labour market is characterised by shortages. Employers, particularly in construction, have lobbied for Syrians to remain. For a government that has pledged to restore economic growth, removing hundreds of thousands of workers from the formal economy would be a remarkable act of self-sabotage. Marcel Fratzscher, head of the DIW economic institute, has warned that large-scale repatriations would be a “huge mistake” that would push the country into a renewed recession.

At the same time, the AfD’s electoral strength paradoxically constrains forceful repatriation — at least for now. Because the CDU refuses to cooperate with the AfD, which holds around 20 per cent of Bundestag seats, it has been compelled to govern with the centre-left SPD — a coalition that effectively rules out large-scale compulsory returns. The language in the coalition agreement on repatriations is extremely vague and the SPD have accused the CSU of pursuing “damaging acts of political theatre” with their proposal to push a mass repatriation programme this year.

Within the CDU itself, there is visible caution. When Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul visited Syria in November, he stated that only “very limited” repatriations were feasible given the country’s devastated housing conditions. In recent weeks, the violent ICE raids in the US have made deportations even more politically combustible. At the Munich Security Conference on Friday, Merz made his most explicit criticism of the Trump administration yet, declaring that the “MAGA culture wars are not ours.”

How high a priority Germany ultimately assigns to repatriation remains to be seen. Unexpected events — such as an Islamist terror attack — could inject sudden urgency into the debate. Alternatively, election successes by the AfD in key state elections this year may pile the pressure on Merz to make good on his promise to conservative voters to make up for what he has called the “shambles” of 2015.

For now though, repatriation is likely to remain more of a buzzword than a hard policy initiative.