Hardly an opportunity goes by in which politicians from the CDU and CSU do not demonstrate their close solidarity – especially when it comes to migration policy. At the moment, however, the two sister parties are an arm’s length apart on this issue. At least.
The reason for this is the demand by the CSU regional group leader in the Bundestag, Alexander Dobrindt, to send refugees from Ukraine who do not want to work back to their homeland. In the CDU, reactions to Dobrindt’s proposal range from cautious approval to head-shaking and harsh indignation. The plan is “flat”, say parts of the CDU, “populist”, “unworkable”. And a “completely unnecessary template” for the traffic light parties. The Union regularly “talks about humanitarian responsibility and the Russian war atrocities”, and then “people are to be sent to a country that is currently a battlefield”, is the unanimous criticism of several CDU Bundestag members.
Representatives of the traffic light coalition promptly seized their opportunity. Dobrindt had barely made his demand in the “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper when SPD parliamentary group vice-chair Dirk Wiese hit back, declaring that the regional group leader should be “ashamed of sending back women and children who may have already lost their fathers at the front.”
Dobrindt’s initiative is not new. And it is not a solo effort. The CSU had already agreed on the principle of “working or returning to safe areas of western Ukraine” at its winter retreat in Seeon Monastery in January. The decision did not attract any attention at the time. “We were surprised ourselves,” said one Christian Socialist. “Perhaps we were ahead of our time.”
But now that it is becoming clear that the war in Ukraine will drag on and the costs for refugees and asylum seekers will continue to cost billions – and this in view of the tight budget situation – the passage is explosive. And all the more so as the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg are approaching. In the east, solidarity with Ukraine is nowhere near as great as in West Germany. The issues of migration and aid for refugees, especially Ukrainians, will certainly be a decisive issue in the election campaign. Dobrindt wants to field the Union on this.
Despite the criticism from the CDU of the CSU regional group leader, the Union faction in the Bundestag is currently having a report examined, according to WELT information, to determine whether it is legally possible to grant Ukrainian refugees a different status in the future. This would mean that they would receive less support than they have previously received as citizens’ allowance recipients. According to information from faction circles, the report should be available in August.
The Union parties do not want Ukrainians to be given the status of asylum seekers in general. This would entail a long review process that would burden the municipalities. The report is intended to be an interim step towards being able to grant Ukrainians a new status between asylum seekers and citizens’ allowance recipients in the future – with a lower standard rate than currently applies to citizens’ allowance. The decision to include Ukrainians in the citizens’ allowance system was supported by the CDU and CSU in 2022.
At the core of Dobrindt’s initiative and the parliamentary group’s reports are the fact that of the approximately 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees in Germany, only about a quarter have a job. This is a low rate compared to other European countries. In the Netherlands, Great Britain and Sweden, at least half of the Ukrainian refugees work, in Poland and the Czech Republic it is around two thirds, and in Denmark more than three quarters.
At the same time, Ukrainians in Germany receive citizen’s allowance – like any needy German citizen. That is more money than refugees receive under the so-called Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act. In addition to the standard rate of 563 euros for a single person, there is housing benefit and a heating allowance, a total of just over 900 euros per adult per month on average. That is also significantly more than Ukrainian refugees receive in most other European countries. Dobrindt calls the citizen’s allowance a “brake on taking up work”. He wants to reduce state aid and send Ukrainians who could work but do not back to their homeland. After all, Germans would also have to expect sanctions if they refused suitable work.
The CSU supports Dobrindt, the CDU only partially when it comes to opposing the principle of citizen’s income in general and for Ukrainians in particular. “I strongly advise us to put the citizen’s income for Ukrainians to the test. Especially since they have never paid in,” says CDU executive committee member Julia Klöckner to WELT. “This leads to discontent among our population.”
The Vice-Chairman for Budget and Finance in the Union parliamentary group, Mathias Middelberg, says: “In any case, Alexander Dobrindt has a point when he addresses the low employment rate of refugees from Ukraine. Here, however, the accusation is not made against the Ukrainians, but against the traffic light government, which is doing nothing to get more citizens’ allowance recipients into work.”
The plan to deport Ukrainians if necessary, however, has been met with criticism from the CDU. “The aim must be to get as many Ukrainians as possible into work. Threatening them with deportation is not very helpful and does not fit with our belief in supporting Ukraine,” says CDU executive committee member Sebastian Lechner, for example, to WELT. “What is crucial is that there are enough daycare places for mothers who want to work, that places for language courses are available more quickly, that professional qualifications are more easily recognized, that we reduce the bureaucracy in general before people start work. And that there are sanctions for those who do not want to work even though they could,” says Lechner, head of the CDU in Lower Saxony.
Young Union leader Johannes Winkel would go further than Dobrindt – but only in the case of men who are fit for military service. “It is fine if we also support Ukrainian women and their children with social benefits,” Winkel tells WELT. “Ukrainian men who are of military age should not have any right to protection in Germany, but should defend their country. Supplying Ukraine with weapons on the one hand, but at the same time denying it its own soldiers is downright cynical.”
