Germany says no longer top EU nation for asylum requests

Germany said Monday that it no longer took top spot in the European Union for new asylum applications, as a media report citing EU data put France and Spain ahead.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the latest figures reflected measures taken to restrain "irregular migration towards Europe as a whole as well as to Germany itself".

"For the first time in years, Germany is no longer the country in which the most applications are filed" in Europe, she added, as authorities reported fewer than 10,000 new cases in March.

The Welt am Sonntag newspaper had reported, citing a confidential EU Commission report, that France and Spain had both received more requests for asylum in the first quarter of the year.

Eurostat data published for February alone appeared to match such a trend, showing that Germany recorded 12,775 new asylum applications compared to 13,065 in France and 12,975 in Spain.

Germany's office for migration and refugees said Monday that first-time asylum applications for January to March fell by almost 45 percent compared to the period in 2024.

Syrian, Afghan, and Turkish nationals had topped the countries of origin for applications.

About 41,000 asylum applications were filed in Germany in the first three months, the office said, without giving data for other European countries.

It added that fewer than 9,000 applications were filed in March, the first time in years the monthly number had been below 10,000.

Immigration and asylum were hotly discussed ahead of February's German elections in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) doubled its vote share after several violent attacks blamed on refugees or asylum seekers.

The issue is also a key sticking point in coalition negotiations between the center-right CDU/CSU and the leftist Social Democrats, with the CDU pushing for asylum seekers to be turned away from Germany's borders on the grounds they have already passed through a safe country.