Merz Said 80% of Syrians Should Leave Germany. Then the Syrian President Said He Never Said That

Friedrich Merz stood next to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Berlin and declared that eighty percent of the Syrian refugees in Germany should return home by 2029. It was the most specific and the most public version of a position Merz has held for years. Within twenty-four hours he was walking it back. Then al-Sharaa told an audience in London he had never said any such figure. Merz’s spokesperson said the number had come from al-Sharaa. Al-Sharaa said it had not.

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The back-and-forth landed in the middle of a coalition the German chancellor cannot afford to fracture. His center-left coalition partners in the SPD have spent months absorbing Merz migration policy decisions they find uncomfortable, from deportation deals with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to turning back asylum-seekers at Germany’s borders. The eighty percent figure pushed SPD lawmakers past a threshold. “What remains is a figure with no plan, no legal basis and no respect for so many people who are part of our society,” said SPD lawmaker Aydan Özoğuz.

The AfD, Merz’s hard-right opponents in parliament, attacked from the other direction. Alice Weidel posted that a genuine deportation drive would only happen with the AfD in government and that Merz was already backtracking less than twenty-four hours after his announcement. SPD lawmaker Hakan Demir described a pattern: “He just throws things out there, and then he takes them back later. There’s a strategy behind it. He wants to stir things up.”

The strategy, if it is one, runs into a number that Merz’s own government cannot easily dismiss. Around sixty percent of Syrian refugees Germany 2015-2016 cohort are now employed. The employment rate among German nationals stands at seventy-one percent, meaning the gap has nearly closed. Nearly one in three employed Syrians works in sectors struggling to fill positions, including healthcare. Syrian professionals constitute the largest group of foreign physicians in Germany, with 5,745 doctors and around 2,000 nurses according to the German Hospital Association.

The demographic argument runs deeper. Syria’s refugees average twenty-seven years of age. By 2029, 5.1 million German baby boomers are expected to retire, with only two million people entering the labor market. IW researcher Fabian Semsarha told Politico that forcing Syrians to leave now would make it harder to attract specialised foreign workers in future: “Even though they did not come as economic migrants, the Syrian population has helped alleviate demographic pressure in Germany.”

In the first ten months of 2025, 6,502 Syrian nationals voluntarily left Germany. Against a population of approximately one million Syrian nationals remaining after 246,320 have already obtained German citizenship, that is a departure rate of less than one percent annually. Merz’s spokesperson said after the controversy that the government was focused on returning those who are not working or not integrated. He declined to provide specific numbers. The eighty percent figure was not mentioned again.

For the roughly 31-year-old Antonios Hazim, finishing a master’s degree in Berlin, the political climate carries weight beyond the policy details: “Above all, I feel a sense of indignity and, at times, anger at what the chancellor appears to be proposing. Much of it strikes me as symbolic politics.”

The Merz Syria deportation debate will not end with one embarrassing press conference. The question of who among Germany’s Syrian population has grounds to stay as Syria’s post-Assad government stabilises is a real legal and policy question. It just does not have an eighty percent answer.