Germany’s opposition party, the conservative CDU / CSU has vowed to overturn the country’s new dual citizenship law should they be re-elected in autumn 2025, as current polls predict will be the case.
A representative of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, Alexander Throm, said to the dpa on June 25 that his party would overturn Germany’s new citizenship law should they be re-elected in 2025.
“The CDU and CSU will reverse this unsuccessful reform,” said Throm. “Dual citizenship must remain the exception and be limited to countries that share our values.”
The new law will come into effect on June 27, 2024. Among other changes, the legislation will allow non-EU citizens with a German residence permit to naturalise after just five years in the country, and after three years in special cases, without having to surrender their original citizenship.
"After five or even three years, it is not yet possible to determine with certainty whether integration has been successful in the long term," Throm said to the dpa. "The recent caliphate demonstrations and the rampant Islamist extremism, often by people with German passports, must be a wake-up call for us all."
Throm’s statement refers to a peaceful rally in Hamburg at the beginning of May, during which around 1.100 people “protested what they called Islamophobic policies and a media campaign against Muslims in Germany,” according to Deutsche Welle. The protest was organised by Muslim Interactive, a group which domestic intelligence authorities classify as extremist.
Under the CDU / CSU government led by Angela Merkel, dual citizenship was steadfastly off the cards. In opposition to the traffic light coalition since 2021, the CDU / CSU maintains that the law “cheapens” the German passport, but was powerless to stop it from progressing through the legislative process in January, with 382 Bundestag members voting in favour of passing the law, 234 voting against and 23 abstaining.
Responding recently to a question on abgeordnetenwatch.de, a website which allows anyone to send Germany’s elected representatives a direct question, CDU / CSU MP Andrea Lindholz said that her party would “stick to our position [on citizenship] and continue to strive for corresponding change”.
The recent EU parliamentary elections saw the CDU come out on top in Germany, winning 30 percent of the vote, the same share they took in a June 23 poll which asked Germans for whom they would vote were a Bundestag election held next Sunday. Waning in popularity, the same poll showed only 15 percent going to Olaf Scholz’s SPD.
From this perspective, a CDU / CSU win at the Bundestag election scheduled for autumn 2025 looks likely, but the party could face several hurdles before overturning the law. First, to form a government they would likely have to come into coalition with the SPD, Greens and / or FDP, all of which helped pass the citizenship law in the first place. While the AfD is currently the second-highest polling party in Germany (17 percent), the CDU said in July 2023 that they would not cooperate with the far-right party.
Polls are likely to see some shifts before election time, but it is unknown in which direction. Another shift is the slowly changing demographic of Germany’s electorate. Even with the citizenship law yet to come into effect, Germany saw the highest number of naturalisations in 23 years in 2023, gaining 200.100 new citizens in one year.
Currently, there are an estimated 6 million foreign citizens who have been living in Germany for over eight years and even more who will become eligible for citizenship once the new five-year rule is adopted. With a massive administrative backlog, how many citizenship applications are processed between now and the autumn election, how new citizens choose to vote and how the demographic shift will impact election results, remains to be seen.
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