GERMANY PERSPECTIVE

Berlin, June 16, 2026. The rejection by Swiss voters of a population ceiling at 10 million inhabitants resonates differently across the Rhine, in a country whose demographers predict precisely the decline that Berne had just symbolically dismissed. In 2025, the German population fell for the first time in many years, losing roughly 100,000 residents and settling at approximately 83.5 million. By 2040, it should drop below 82 million, according to projections from the IW, the Cologne Institute for Economic Research.

The comparison with Switzerland ends there, but it speaks volumes. Where Swiss voters decided against artificially constraining their demographics, Germany is moving in the opposite direction, driven by both declining birth rates and deliberately restrictive migration policy. "Germany is not on the threshold of demographic change — it is already at the heart of it," warns Holger Schaefer, economist at IW Cologne. The institute estimates that the working-age population will contract by 4.3 million by 2036, a decline of roughly 7 percent, driven by massive baby boomer retirements and now-diminished immigration.

This drying up of migration flows into Germany is not accidental. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative coalition has made migration hardening a priority, seeking to reduce the electoral influence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). But this strategy carries a documented economic cost: the IW report explicitly notes that migration to the EU's most populous nation will remain "constrained by diminished economic prospects and the federal government's migration turn."

ZEIT Online emphasizes the European dimension of the debate: the reform of the Common European Asylum System (GEAS), which took effect Friday, aims to reduce arrivals through expedited procedures at external borders. The newspaper observes, with restrained irony, that "pursuing rightist politics does not make the right less right, but satisfied" — a formula reflecting unease among parts of the German liberal press about this escalating migration rhetoric.

On the ground, tensions are palpable. A survey by The Local Germany, confirmed by the National Monitor on Discrimination and Racism released in late 2025, reveals that foreigners in Germany face structural discrimination on the rental market: belonging to certain minorities, particularly Black and Muslim communities, "makes finding housing significantly harder." Readers report hundreds of applications without response, some never invited to viewings, their foreign-sounding names serving as an implicit filter.

Thus, the Swiss vote — pragmatic, grounded in economic necessity and European commitments — acts as a counterpoint to German debate. Berne refused to close itself off; Berlin, under electoral pressure, gradually commits to doing so, risking, according to its own economic institutes, a deepening labor shortage already threatening the welfare state.