10/23/2025October 23, 2025
Merz doubles down on ‘cityscape’ remark as vice chancellor warns against division
Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Wednesday doubled down on his seemingly negative comments about urban migration despite his deputy cautioning against fomenting social divisions.
Speaking on the sidelines of a West Balkans summit in London, Merz said that Europeans were restricted in their freedoms by migrants who did not obey the law.
“Many of them also determine the public image in our cities,”he said. “That’s why so many people in Germany and other countries in the European Union — and not just in Germany — are now simply afraid to move around in public spaces,” said the chancellor.
He said those spaces included railway stations, underground trains and parks.
“It affects entire neighborhoods, which also cause major problems for our police,” he added.
His remarks followed on from last week’s remark implying that migrants in some way sullied German “cityscapes,” which provoked much criticism, even from the ranks of his own conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party and protests outside the CDU’s Berlin headquarters.
Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil earlier warned that politicians “have to be very careful what kind of discussion we initiate when we suddenly divide people into us and them, into people with a family history of migration and those without.”
“I want to live in a country where politics builds bridges and brings society together instead of dividing it with words,” said Klingbeil, who leads the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany’s coalition
government and also serves as finance minister.
“I want to live in a country where appearance does not determine whether you fit into the image of the city or not,” he added.
German chancellor under fire for immigration comments
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