Senior figures in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are drafting proposals to abolish dual citizenship for naturalizing immigrants and to raise the bar on language and financial self-sufficiency.
The plans surfaced in an interview that Günter Krings, a deputy chairman of the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) parliamentary group, gave The Telegraph ahead of the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 43.8% of the vote, its first outright victory in any German state election.
The CDU, which had led every Saxony-Anhalt government since 2002, fell to 17.2%, less than half its 2021 result. With 39 of the Landtag’s 83 seats, the AfD finished three short of an absolute majority.
Krings, who served as parliamentary state secretary in the interior ministry from 2013 to 2021, told the paper that previous governments had made acquiring German citizenship “too fast and too easy.”
In his view, “naturalisation should only be the last step at the end of an integration process into our workforce, society and constitutional order,” because “we cannot accept that people live in a parallel society and want to be German citizens at the same time.”
Four elements make up the reported package. Applicants would have to renounce their previous citizenship, pass a language examination demonstrating command of complex subjects rather than everyday B1 German, cover their living costs entirely from their own income, and disavow “all forms of anti-Semitism.”
The CDU lawmaker also took aim at the case-law standard under which covering 51% of one’s livelihood from one’s own income suffices for naturalization, arguing that a person who draws nearly half his income from the welfare state cannot claim economic integration.
A Law in Permanent Revision
Until mid-2024, Germany ran one of Europe’s most restrictive regimes on multiple nationality. Naturalization generally required eight years of residence and renunciation of the previous citizenship, with exceptions mainly for European Union (EU) and Swiss nationals.
That changed when the Act on the Modernization of Nationality Law, passed under Olaf Scholz’s coalition, took effect on June 27, 2024.
It cut the standard residence requirement from eight to five years, allowed all naturalizing applicants to keep their previous nationality (previously an exception reserved mainly for EU and Swiss citizens), and created a three-year fast track for exceptionally integrated applicants with C1-level German.
That fast track lasted 16 months. On October 8, 2025, the Bundestag voted 450 to 134 to delete the three-year route, a repeal that entered into force on October 30; the five-year standard and dual citizenship survived because the CDU/CSU-Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition agreement expressly preserved both.
In March 2026, the AfD tabled a motion to restore the eight-year requirement and raise the language bar to B2, which the Bundestag rejected on March 25 by 438 votes to 135.
Krings’s proposals would now take the CDU beyond its own coalition agreement and onto terrain the AfD has occupied for years.
The Numbers Driving the Backlash
Germany naturalized a record 332,500 people in 2025, according to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), up 14% on the previous record of 291,955 set in 2024 and the fifth consecutive annual high.
It was the first time the figure crossed 300,000 since the statistics began in 2000, and Destatis attributes the surge directly to the 2024 reform.
Syrians accounted for one in five new citizens (65,600), despite a 21% year-on-year decline, followed by Turkish nationals (34,100) and Russians (19,700), both up 51%.
Naturalizations of Americans doubled to 6,600, while restitution naturalizations for descendants of those stripped of citizenship by the Nazi regime rose 61% to 12,000.
The average new citizen in 2025 had lived in Germany for 12.4 years, up from 11.8 the year before, and the abolished turbo route accounted for under 1% of naturalizations in its final year.
A survey by Mediendienst Integration of city naturalization authorities shows that between 85% and 98% of new citizens in the cities that collect such data kept their previous nationality, an outcome Krings flagged in June when the record figures landed: “The fact that new naturalisations in such high numbers lead to dual citizenship is not a good development. We have to react legislatively here.”
The stock of dual nationals is now measurable at scale. Destatis’s 2025 microcensus counts 4.03 million residents of Germany holding two citizenships, among them 3.61 million German nationals, with Poland (458,000), Turkey (389,000), Russia (353,000), Syria (243,000), and the United States (103,000) the most common second passports.
Cumulatively, Germany has naturalized some 3.35 million people since 2000.
Where Investment Migration Comes In
The 2024 reform did not only change the rules for immigrants; it repealed Section 25 of the Nationality Act, under which Germans automatically forfeited their citizenship upon voluntarily acquiring another one.
Since June 27, 2024, a German national can obtain any foreign citizenship, including citizenship by investment, without a retention permit and without losing his German passport.
Henley’s’ 2026 Private Wealth report places Germany 13th among the firm’s client source nationalities, up from 24th in 2024, and records a 16% rise in German inquiries between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, with interest spanning the US EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, Caribbean CBI, and several emerging jurisdictions.
No official dataset counts how many Germans hold golden visas or investment citizenships abroad. Germans barely register in the program statistics of Greece, Portugal, or other European golden visa jurisdictions because EU free movement already grants them settlement rights across the bloc, so German demand concentrates on non-EU options for which firm-level inquiry data remain the only proxy.
Krings’s reported comments target immigrants naturalizing in Germany, leaving open whether a CDU bill would also revive the automatic-loss rule for Germans acquiring a foreign citizenship.
A return to the pre-2024 regime on that front would once again turn CBI into a citizenship-for-citizenship swap for German nationals, which is the scenario German applicants and their advisors will watch most closely.
Foreign residents in Germany have exposure of their own. The country offers no golden visa, but its Section 21 self-employment route functions as a de facto investor pathway, and entrepreneurs who naturalize after five years on that route would face higher language and income bars.
A Proposal, Not Yet a Bill
Any legislation would need the SPD, whose coalition agreement with the CDU preserves dual citizenship and the five-year standard, and which has softened CDU migration initiatives before.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt framed last year’s fast-track repeal as reducing “pull factors” for irregular migration; reopening the dual citizenship question would mean reopening the coalition agreement itself.
Two more state elections follow this month, in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and the citizenship question is likely to remain part of the campaign backdrop. Whether the Krings proposals advance from internal debate to a government bill will depend on negotiations within the coalition that have not yet begun.
What the past two years suggest is that German citizenship law could remain a moving target. The October 2025 repeal contained no transition clause, and pending three-year applications were assessed under the rules in force at the time of decision rather than at the time of filing; applicants and advisors on either side of the naturalization equation might weigh that precedent when considering their timing.
