'Racism has become felt and direct,' Moroccans in Germany say as migration rhetoric hardens

Moroccans in Germany say hostility toward foreigners is rising as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s remarks linking part of violence against women to migration feed a broader hardening of political rhetoric on migrants in Europe’s largest economy.

Merz argued in a Bundestag debate in March that a “considerable part” of violence against women came from migrant groups, language that critics said shifted a debate about gender based violence into one about migration and public order.

“ Despite the [Moroccan] community’s ability to adapt, racism has become ‘felt’ and direct in everyday life situations,” Hicham Obeidi, a Moroccan sociologist and social worker based in Germany, told Hespress.

Merz had pushed conservative discourse further right to recover voters lost to the far right, Obeidi said. The result was a climate in which foreigners were discussed less as workers, neighbours or citizens and more as a security problem.

Migration has become one of the main fault lines in German politics as mainstream parties face pressure from the Alternative for Germany, whose rise has pushed the debate further toward border control, deportations and crime.

Germany’s 2024 police crime statistics recorded 913,196 non German suspects, or 41.8% of all suspects, but the Federal Criminal Police Office has long warned that simple comparisons can mislead because the category includes groups with different age profiles, legal statuses and levels of exposure to police controls.

“The violence comes from men” left lawmaker Clara Bünger said in the   Bundestag debate, and argued that such violence was not “imported” but long embedded in society, accusing the right of turning a discussion about protecting women into a debate about migration.

Nadia Yaqine, a Moroccan local official in Mommenheim and head of the Moroccan German Institute for Studies and Research, said the public debate often ignored an important detail: Moroccans are not among the main foreign groups usually cited in the 2024 national figures.

Germany had about 149,700 Moroccan nationals at the end of 2024, making the group visible but far smaller than the country’s largest foreign communities, including Turks, Ukrainians and Syrians.

Yaqine said the larger risk was generalisation, where a complex issue was reduced to a stereotype that spread across Arabic-speaking and North African communities.

Her concern points to an older pattern in Germany, where episodes such as the Cologne New Year’s Eve assaults in 2015 and 2016 left a durable imprint on how some migrant groups are discussed in public life.