Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Friedrich Merz over remarks he made in the Bundestag on September 9.
In the budget debate Merz said the party’s “remigration” slogan was “nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin colour”.
The AfD parliamentary group says that is a defamatory insult.
Its parliamentary whip and legal counsel, Stephan Brandner, called the words “criminally relevant” and “completely unacceptable”.
He said the group stood “firmly on the ground of the Basic Law” and that the charge implied expulsions and killings.
The complaint, the party says, is aimed at Merz personally and at what it calls slander of millions of citizens.
Members of the Bundestag are normally shielded from prosecution for what they say in the chamber under Article 46 of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution.
That protection, known as indemnity, does not cover defamatory insults.
Brandner argues Merz crossed that line.
The Chancellor spoke after AfD co-leader Alice Weidel had attacked the government.
Merz also said an AfD-style migration crackdown would damage the economy and that many trades rely on workers with a migration background. He said one in six workers in the skilled trades held a foreign passport and that without them “not a single care home” would function.
He added that Germany still needed to deport more people with no permanent right to stay.
Heckling from AfD deputies led Bundestag President Julia Klöckner to threaten to expel the entire group from the chamber.
The exchange came three days after the AfD’s victory in the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, eastern Germany.
The party took 43.8 per cent of the vote, according to the preliminary official result. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had led the state government, fell to 17.2 per cent.
Remigration has become a contested word. The AfD party describes it as applying existing deportation law to criminals and people whose asylum claims have failed.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), describes remigration as a concept aimed at ethnically defined societies and the removal of people classed as “alien to the people”.
Parts of the AfD are under observation as right-wing extremist.
The Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified as such by the state’s intelligence service since 2023. On February 26, a Cologne court provisionally barred the BfV from applying that label to the national party.
Historians Andreas Rödder and Michael Wolffsohn, quoted in German papers, said “ethnic cleansing” in its usual sense involves organised violence and does not match the party’s remigration plans. The phrase is historically loaded.
Brandner said on the night of the debate, on ARD talk show Maischberger, that Merz had sounded like “an unleashed left-wing extremist”.
He is himself facing a separate criminal case over remarks in the 2023 Hesse state election campaign, according to Brandner. The Bundestag lifted his immunity on September 10.
Es reicht JETZT,#PinocchioFritze🤥! pic.twitter.com/h920DMeniH
— 🇩🇪Stephan Brandner🇩🇪 (@BrandnerSt) September 10, 2026
