Overview

• At a Potsdam event, Chancellor Friedrich Merz touted a 60% drop in asylum numbers year over year and added there was "still this problem in the cityscape," linking it to enabling large-scale returns.
• Greens and Left leaders in the Bundestag called the phrasing discriminatory and "unworthy of a chancellor," with Katharina Dröge asking how such a "problem" would be identified other than by skin color.
• The government spokesman urged against overinterpretation, saying Merz spoke in his role as CDU chair, and the Bundespresseamt left the contested sentence out of its official record citing neutrality rules.
• Responses split across the center-right: Berlin’s CDU mayor Kai Wegner distanced himself from the wording while backing more deportations, Saxony’s Michael Kretschmer defended the concern as about shared values, and FDP general secretary Nicole Büttner and an Arche Berlin spokesman voiced support for raising the issue.
• Civil-society and SPD voices, including the NRW Integrationsrat, condemned the language as racially coded and dangerous, and as of Thursday no apology from Merz had been reported.