Merz accuses AfD of ethnic cleansing over its remigration plan

Merz accuses AfD of ethnic cleansing over its remigration plan

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz raised the temperature in the Bundestag and used a phrase German politics has avoided for decades: ethnic cleansing. He aimed it at Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose mantra of "remigration" — expelling hundreds of thousands of foreigners to restore German identity — he equated with deportation based on origin and skin colour. The remark did not come out of nowhere: it came three days after the AfD won the election in Saxony-Anhalt, with its co-leader Alice Weidel putting figures on the project before the full chamber.

What is remigration and why the term causes outrage

Remigration sounds like administrative management. That is what is being debated in Germany: whether it is a technical euphemism to avoid saying expulsion or something worse. Some trace the use of the concept back to the Balkans in the 1990s and point to the paradox that vocabulary coined to whitewash cleansing operations is now being recycled in political terms. The underlying debate is about labels and legal consequences: what can and cannot be done with a passport and an origin.

The economic hole nobody wants to look at

The cost of the promise does not appear in the speeches. Without migrant labour, the argument goes, care homes, hospitals and hospitality would not cope: demographics are not debated, they are endured. In parallel, another uncomfortable figure is being pointed at Merz himself: the 200 billion in new debt to prop up an industry that is not taking off. And the operational question: how do you deport a million people under German law without triggering a bigger social crisis.

The accusation remains where it started. Some read it as a semantic bomb from a party that is disintegrating in the East; others, as a literal description of a programme. The real number of planned deportations has still not been published, nor how they would be carried out.