Germany offers refugees free rent and home renovations if they leave

Germany is offering to pay for asylum-seekers’ house renovations and a year’s free rent if they go home.

Container homes for refugees at the Tempelhofer Feld former airfield in Berlin. The village of 256 apartments made of three containers each offers space for more than 1000 refugees. Picture: AFP

Germany is offering asylum-seekers new fitted kitchens, bathrooms and a year’s free rent if they go home, in the latest measure seeking to increase the return of refugees to their country of origin.

The cash incentive is marketed to refugees under the slogan “Your country. Your future. Now!”

Immigration has become the main political issue as Germany tries to form a government after inconclusive elections.

Existing financial incentives of up to €1200 ($1875) each for refugees to leave Germany will be topped up by €3000 for each family and €1000 for individuals if they voluntarily return home over the next three months. The cash can be used for rent or home renovations in a desperate attempt to persuade refugees to leave of their own accord to reduce numbers and take the political heat out of the issue next year.

“When you voluntarily decide to return by the end of February, in addition to start-up help you can provisionally receive housing cost help for the first 12 months in your homeland,” Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper yesterday.

Only 8639 migrants participated in the return programme between February and October this year even though there are 115,000 eligible rejected asylum-seekers.

Refugee organisations have attacked the latest financial incentive as bribery and an underhand strategy to persuade asylum-seekers to give up their rights in return for cash. “He’s trying to entice people to give up their rights in the basest manner,” Gunter Burkhardt, the head of Pro Asyl, said yesterday.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere. Picture: AFP

The elections in September were dominated by immigration and the rise of the nationalist anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, leaving a weakened Angela Merkel still trying to form a new coalition government after the first round of talks collapsed last month over the refugee question.

Controversial measures to begin the deportation of Syrians - who arrived in their hundreds of thousands in 2015 - after the middle of 2018 have been tabled by regional governments controlled by Mrs Merkel’s conservatives.

The Bavarian interior ministry, one of the regional governments that supports the measure, told Welt am Sonntag yesterday that Afghans who have been refused asylum tended to disappear days before their deportation flights. Instead of 50 Afghans at a time being sent home only an average of five people from each “collective flight” hand themselves in for deportation or can be found, an official said.

The nationalist hardliner Alexander Gauland was elected leader of the AfD on Saturday alongside the more moderate Jorg Meuthen, suggesting that the AfD, which has 94 MPs in parliament, will continue to move towards the anti-immigrant right wing.

After a bomb scare in Potsdam on Friday, relatives of 12 people killed in the terrorist attack at a Berlin Christmas market last year said that they had been “left in the lurch” by Mrs Merkel and attacked her “political inaction”.

“At a time when the threat posed by dangerous Islamists has greatly increased, you have failed to push ahead with expanding resources and reforming the confused official structures for fighting these dangers,” they wrote in Der Spiegel magazine.

The Times