Backlash after German minister suggests cap on immigrant students in schools
Welt
tv program over the weekend, Germany's Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU) said she was open to introducing a cap on the number of students with a migrant background in school classes.
Her comments came in response to a question from
Welt's
editor-in-chief, who had referenced similar efforts in Denmark.
Prien suggested that a cap of 30 to 40 percent was a 'conceivable model,' emphasizing that the decisive factor for school success is that children should be able to speak German when they start school.
She called for early, mandatory language tests for four-year-olds and binding language learning support measures for those identified as needing help.
Prien argued that looking at the experiences of other countries—specifically Denmark—could provide valuable insights.
What's happening in Denmark?
While Denmark does not have a formal, nationwide quota for children with a migrant background in schools, it has implemented
similar measures
in certain areas.
In neighbourhoods with a very high proportion of children with a migrant background, the Danish government reportedly required schools to pause the admission of new students and develop plans to attract more 'ethnically Danish' students.
However, these were localised interventions, and not a blanket national quota system.
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What parents in Germany should know about the planned schools shake up
Reaction in Germany
Prien's remarks were met with immediate and widespread criticism.
The Federal Government's Integration Commissioner, Natalie Pawlik (SPD), rejected the proposal, arguing that 'Germany does not need quotas in the classroom' and that integration is best achieved through targeted support, not exclusion.
The president of the German Teachers' Association, Stefan Düll, said that using a child's foreign roots as a benchmark was not helpful. He called the idea of quotas 'problematic', noting the logistical challenges in areas where almost half the population has a migrant background.
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How German leaders are blaming foreigners for country's woes
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He and other education experts stressed that language skills, not background, should be the main criterion for school admission.
Opposition parties and associations also voiced strong concerns.
The Left Party called the proposal unworkable, especially in urban centres, and warned of stigmatization and exclusion.
The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), on the other hand, criticized Prien's proposal as 'too lax', called for a significantly lower limit of ten percent.
READ ALSO:
More childcare, less paperwork - How Germany can make life easier for foreign parents
In fact media reports, including one by the German teachers' magazine
News4teachers
,
have pointed out that the idea of introducing migrant quotas in Germany was first suggested by the AfD.
Not constitutional
Despite the polarised debate that Prien's comments sparked, the legal, practical, and political obstacles to introducing school quotas in Germany appear insurmountable.
Germany's Basic Law (
Grundgesetz
) prohibits discrimination based on origin, meaning that the constitutional court would almost certainly challenge the legality of mandating migrant quotas in schools.
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Additionally, in Germany education is primarily the responsibility of states rather than the federal government. So only the states (
Länder
) can implement binding rules on quotas or mandatory language tests.
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DW
2 hours ago
- DW
Will Germany raise retirement age beyond 67? – DW – 08/01/2025
Germany's old-age pension system faces collapse under the weight of an aging population. The country's new Economy Minister Katherina Reiche wants Germans to work longer to make up for it. For German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, there's a simple way to fix Germany's pension system: "We need to work more and longer," she flatly told the newspaper in late July, instantly triggering a new debate along familiar lines. Reiche argued that the pledges her government had made in the coalition contract earlier this year were just not going to be enough. Germany's aging population has long been recognized as a problem. The population's median age — 46.7 — is the eighth-highest in the world and the third-highest among major economies, after Japan and Italy. By 2040, fully a quarter of the population is expected to be 67 or older. This year, birth rate fell to its lowest point in 20 years. This has had a marked effect: In the early 1960s, there were still six actively insured workers for every pensioner — that ratio is now 2 to 1 and sinking, and in 2025, two-thirds of the Labor Ministry's budget will go into the pension system: €121 billion ($140 billion). "It cannot be sustainable in the long term for us to work only two-thirds of our adult lives and spend one-third in retirement," said Reiche. "Unfortunately, too many people have been refusing to accept the demographic reality for too long." Reiche's statements triggered a quick backlash from her center-left Cabinet colleagues. Lars Klingbeil, finance minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which traditionally sees itself catering to a working-class electorate, described Reiche's statement as a "slap in the face" for many workers. "It's easy to say that when you're sitting in your comfortable chair in Berlin," Klingbeil told news outlet ntv. "But you should go out and talk to the people in the country who are working as roofers, who are working as nurses, who are working as teachers and are really wearing themselves out and who are already struggling to make it to 67." Trade unions, meanwhile, said Reiche's plan was simply a new way to cut pensions. Many workers will be unable to work to a higher age for health reasons, forcing them to retire early, and accept deductions that permanently reduce their pensions. The contract agreed by Germany's two governing parties — Reiche's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the SPD — promised that Germany's current retirement age would not be raised. Instead, the contract pledged, "We want more flexibility in the transition from job to pension." In practice, "flexibility" means offering incentives to people who work beyond the legal retirement age. This would include measures like the so-called "Aktivrente" ("active pension"), by which any income of up to €2,000 per month is tax-free for those above the legal retirement age. Jan Scharpenberg, pensions expert at the financial advice company Finanztip, is convinced that the German pension system urgently needs to be reformed, but that the debate around it has become tedious. "The length of a working life is just one of the levers that can be adjusted to reform the German pension system in order to deal with the demographic transformation," he told DW. "And if I'm being really honest, I think it's a bit exhausting how for years and decades the same pro- and con arguments are being made, but no actual reform is put in place." While he agrees that raising the legal retirement age may become necessary, that doesn't negate the argument that it would, in practical terms, mean pension cuts for some people. "Those two things can be true at the same time, but that shouldn't prevent a pension reform," he said. "A reform of the system will only work if you combine and pull several levers." The retirement age system in Germany is dauntingly complicated. At the moment, the legal retirement age in Germany is 65, though it is scheduled to rise to 67 by 2031. But the age is staggered depending on the individual's year of birth, and how long they have paid into the system. And there are exceptions: People who are disabled or have paid into the system for 45 years, for example, can retire earlier. A contribution of 18.6% of an employee's gross monthly salary goes into the state retirement fund, with the employee and the employer each paying half. The government expects this contribution rate to rise to 22.3% by 2035, where it is supposed to level out until 2045. Johannes Geyer, public economics researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), pointed out that the reason why the retirement age issue is so contentious is because it affects workers differently. "There are lot of people who can't imagine working beyond the age of 67," he said. "But those in perhaps better paid jobs can do that." To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But many experts say the narrow focus on the retirement age is unhelpful, as there are many different ways of increasing contributions to the pension system. One measure, for example, would be to provide better child care facilities, so that more single parents are able to work full-time and therefore pay higher pension contributions. Another solution might be to make migrating to Germany to work easier and more attractive. There are also proposals to increase the number of people paying into the public system by including the self-employed and civil servants, a proposal made recently by Labor Minister Bärbel Bas from the SPD. Meanwhile, on the expense side of the ledger, some more painful measures might be put in place to balance the books. Apart from raising the retirement age, that might mean extending the "waiting time" (the number of years one must pay into the system before one can begin to draw a pension), or reducing the rate at which pensions increase every year. The pension increase is calculated based on the development of gross wages and salaries in Germany and is 3.74% for 2025. In the coalition agreement, the SPD was able to secure the pension level at 48% of the standard pension to the average income (before taxes) until 2031. Critics have labeled this as untenable. According to Scharpenberg, a mix of measures needs to be implemented. But instead, he said, the perennial political debate revolves around doing one measure or another, as if it were impossible to combine them. The German pension system is structured very differently to other European countries. In Denmark, for example, the retirement age is linked to the country's life expectancy, so that it rises automatically as people live longer. And in Sweden, an individual's contributions are invested in various financial markets and then the profits are paid out when that person reaches old age. "That helps to diversify the risk," said Geyer. "They're not so dependent on the aging of their own population." In the German system, on the other hand, contributions from workers are put into a single pot, which is used to finance current pensions. Geyer argues that, unlike other European countries, Germany has failed to develop private insurance options to complement state pensions so that they help the whole population, rather than just the rich. "Other countries have done that significantly better," he said. "The UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden — they all have systems of obligatory insurance with relatively low costs and good profits. That's missing here."While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
Local Germany
8 hours ago
- Local Germany
OPINION: Why Germany's pensions problems will soon be your problem
Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil presented his budget for 2026 this week. And now that the debt brake has been taken very firmly off, he's splashing the cash. So much so that it's easy to lose track of where the money is coming from – and where it's going: billions for the Bundeswehr here, billions for Deutsche Bahn there; even the consolation prizes for out-of-fashion green initiatives have nine-figure price-tags… But the real story here is not the €126 billion in off-plan spending on defence, infrastructure, and net zero. It's the near-identical sum which will be spent on pensions: €127,8 billion. That's almost a quarter of the regular budget, which stands at €520 billion. And given the lower-than-projected tax take in year six of economic stagnation, this level of spending will require a record €170 billion of government debt. So yes, we are, in essence, topping up the pension fund on credit. How the German pensions system works If you are employed in Germany, you make monthly contributions of 9.3 percent of your salary to an arms-length body, Rentenversicherung , which is matched one-to-one by your employer. Similarly to systems such National Insurance in the UK, the idea is for those in the workforce to finance pensions while they themselves acquire entitlements for their own retirement. So in theory, the government shouldn't need to allocate any budget to the system at all. Yet in practice – in another similarity to the UK's National Insurance – the system stopped working a long time ago and now requires annual injections of cash from the state exchequer to stay afloat. Unfavourable demographics The principal cause is that Germany now has far more retirees living much longer set against a rapidly-declining working population. Advertisement When the current pensions architecture was put in place in the 1950s, there were around six people in work for every one person claiming a pension. Average life expectancy was still below 70, and as Chancellor Adenauer famously remarked: ' Kinder kriegen die Leute immer ' (People always have kids). It didn't turn out that way. Instead, as life expectancy heads past 80, there are now only three workers for every pensioner; soon, this ratio will be closer to two to one. READ ALSO: 'Multiple crises' - Why fewer babies are being born in Germany While Germany is not alone here, our 1950-1970 boomers proved both particularly numerous and particularly shy of having children, so we have worse statistics than neighbouring countries – and more trouble paying pensions. 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Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Axel Heimken Yet there will be no reduction in entitlements for higher earners, so the money will have to come from… That's right, future budgets! By 2027/2028, we can expect subsidies to the system to be approaching one third of regular spending. This means that, once the €500-billion off-plan bonanza ends in 2029/2030, there'll be direct competition for resources between the Army and the army of pensioners. Whoever the Finance Minister is by then, they'll be weighing up whether to spend on upgrading railways or uprating pensions. OPINION: If Germany is to thrive it must help foreigners feel they belong here What is already obvious: they'll opt for the latter. As everybody knows, turkeys don't vote for Christmas – and any politician looking to please turkeys doesn't put them on the menu. As pensioners make up an ever-growing proportion of the electorate, no major party will campaign to make them even marginally worse-off. 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READ ALSO: '€10 a month' - Germany to set up pension accounts for all children from age 6 Of course, no-one is going to say that out loud, which is why this thorny issue has been delegated to a commission which will report on the matter in the coming… *Yawn*. As anyone who has worked in a German company knows: Wenn man nicht weiter weiß, bildet man einen Arbeitskreis! (If you don't know the answer, set up a committee!) So if you're in work in Germany, there are two ways of looking at: Pessimistically, you're being sucked dry by a Ponzi scheme which will have collapsed by the time you're of pension age. Or, optimistically, politicians' consistent refusals to change anything mean that, when you hit retirement age, you'll be having the cash splashed on you – and may see the whole issue quite differently. Advertisement One thing's for sure: if Germany retains its system in anything like the present form, it will remain generous by comparison to many other countries – who will also be facing demographic pressures to varying degrees and seeking to keep spending under control. And a country without any pension provision at all is almost inconceivable. Indeed, as one of German politics' most enduring soundbites has it: " Die Rente ist sicherI " (Your pension is safe).
Local Germany
11 hours ago
- Local Germany
Germany to start deliveries of two Patriot systems to Ukraine
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