Author: Jasper Gebhardt

On Oct. 6, Tobias Rausch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was elected president of Saxony-Anhalt’s state parliament, the first time a member of the party has led a German state legislature. He received 48 votes in a secret ballot, four more than the AfD and the populist Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason (BSW) hold together.

Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the Social Democrats called the vote a Tabubruch, or “taboo breach.” Sven Schulze, the state’s minister-president and a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), rejected suggestions that the extra votes came from his party. The AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, plans to run for Schulze’s office in December.

The vote comes as Germany’s governing parties have adopted increasingly stringent migration measures, turning back asylum seekers at the border, suspending family reunification for some refugees, and lengthening the path to citizenship. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has argued that acting on migration will help counter the far right’s growing appeal. The AfD’s support has risen anyway. The party won 20.8% of the vote in the February 2025 federal election and now averages about 28% in national polls, roughly eight points ahead of Merz’s CDU.

For the roughly 1.3 million Ukrainians living in Germany, the policy shift has already arrived. In November 2025, the federal cabinet approved a bill to move Ukrainians who arrived after April 1, 2025, from Bürgergeld (Citizen’s Allowance, Germany’s standard welfare benefit) to the lower payments given to asylum seekers. In April, a Unity Hub opened in Berlin, funded by Germany and operated by Ukraine, that offers services to Ukrainians and is partly intended to encourage returns. Merz called the return of fighting-age men “essential to ensure Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, its social cohesion and reconstruction.” And in July, the European Union stopped automatically granting protection to newly arriving Ukrainian men who have not met their military obligations.

Anastasiia Yakovlieva, 25, who has lived in Germany since fleeing the war in Ukraine in 2022, said the dean of her Ukrainian university had attended a conference in Berlin where officials were “already organizing special centers for reintegration of Ukrainians back to Ukraine.”

Yakovlieva said that Germany seems to be “working in both directions.” The country has also made it easier for Ukrainians to stay, she said, including by renewing their protection each year, allowing them to exchange Ukrainian driver’s licenses, simplifying recognition of Ukrainian degrees, and offering German classes.

Jan-Werner Müller, a political theorist and professor of politics at Princeton University, said that the AfD has come to “own” migration as an issue. Other German parties, he said, helped by making migration a central topic of debate, which lent legitimacy to far-right framings. The AfD’s perceived competence on migration, he said, has spilled over into other areas such as the economy.

Müller said the federal government has largely addressed the AfD’s complaints about migration, yet the party continues to grow partly because it serves as a vessel for broader discontent. As its name suggests, he said, it provides voters an “alternative” – one that can channel general grievances into anti-migration sentiment.

“No far-right populist has ever run out of scapegoats,” Müller said.

The AfD has directed some of that rhetoric at Ukrainians. Siegmund said during the Saxony-Anhalt campaign that “remigration,” a term the AfD uses for mass deportation, should apply to anyone who does not contribute to society, and included Ukrainian refugees without jobs. The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt platform called for ending war-refugee status for Ukrainians.

Müller said the AfD often frames such proposals through “ethnopluralism,” the idea that different ethnic and cultural groups should live in their own distinct regions rather than in multicultural societies. The framing, he said, allows the party to present deportation as being in migrants’ own interest.

Ukraine has also featured in right-wing populist campaigns elsewhere in Europe. In Hungary, former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán routinely attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his reelection campaign before losing April’s election, ending 16 years in power. Sofiia Patkanovtsiy, a Princeton University sophomore from Uzhhorod, a Ukrainian city near the Hungarian border, said “our country and our people were definitely a big thing in the agendas during the [Hungarian] election.”

Employment data complicate the far-right claim that Ukrainian refugees do not contribute, though the data show a gap. Nearly 40% of Ukrainian nationals in Germany were employed in June 2026, with the number growing consistently. Researchers have cited language barriers, a lack of childcare and slow recognition of foreign qualifications.

Yakovlieva said she has seen those barriers firsthand. Her mother, who holds a finance degree from a Ukrainian university, completed a months-long training course recommended by a German job center but was turned down for a kindergarten assistant job because she lacked the required degree.

“Ukrainians are people that are really willing to learn and to practice what they used to practice in Ukraine, just to have their jobs back,” Yakovlieva said. “Sometimes it is just frustrating for people who get refused to even get to an interview.” A 2025 survey by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) found that 94% of Ukrainian refugees in Germany who were not employed said they wanted to work.

Yakovlieva noted that Germany may have a longer-term incentive to keep refugees in the country. “Germany is getting older,” she said. “They need the labor power here.” The German workforce is projected to decrease by 4.7% in the next two decades.

Ukrainians are not the only group facing the shift. Germany has resumed deportations to Syria and Afghanistan, and the federal migration office has revoked protection from a growing share of Syrians whose cases it reviews.

Whether Germany’s stricter approach will slow the AfD remains uncertain. Siegmund needs 42 votes to become minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt; the AfD holds 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats.

For Yakovlieva, the policy debate does not change what she would need to return to Ukraine: an improvement in “the security situation.”

“Even if the war ends, there is going to be a couple years where the situation in Ukraine is going to be really tough,” she said, “because of the mental health crisis, the financial crisis in Ukraine, and the whole rebuilding process.”

Throughout Panievsky’s discussions of journalistic objectivity, I noticed that objectivity is frequently more of a performance than a truth-seeking method. I found it ironic that “objectivity” is often pursued by trying to mimic what journalists perceive the public’s interpretation of objectivity to be. The result is not less subjectivity, just subjectivity that goes unacknowledged.

Journalism holds on to norms like the “right to reply” even when those norms no longer serve their purpose (86), and it often treats balance as a substitute for truth (97-98). As Panievsky writes, “Journalists often avoid determining who is right, as each deviation from their neutral stance is considered unprofessional or partisan” (101). The problem is that this kind of neutrality is defined by the debate, not by facts. If one side shifts to the extreme, the “middle ground” moves with it, and a reporter standing there is no longer neutral in any useful sense. Panievsky also finds that the shift to the right was not a response to any real bias. Leaning right was meant “to perform a ‘correction’ to the supposed bias journalists believed their audience attributed to them” (109).

This reminded me of how anthropology wrestles with a similar problem. The standard of ethnography was once to observe other cultures from a neutral distance, with the implied authority and objectivity of an expert researcher. Now, the discipline has come to accept that observers do not stand fully inside or outside of their subject. Instead of claiming objectivity, ethnographers are trained to acknowledge their own position and explain how it shaped their work. Panievsky touches on the tensions between academic and journalistic objectivity (105). The two can’t be directly translated. A news story has no room for the kind of reflexive discussion an ethnography includes, and readers expect reporters to tell them what happened, not to write about themselves. But the underlying ideas may still be useful. A reporter who explains how they reached a conclusion or provides broader context on their process might be better protected against charges of bias than one who avoids reaching conclusions or acknowledging their process at all.

For me, these chapters show that objectivity, as often practiced by journalists, is aimed at the audience rather than the facts. That makes it easy to exploit. A party that complains loudly enough about bias can shift coverage without proving anything, because journalists are responding to how they think they are seen. Treating objectivity as a question of method rather than appearance seems like a steadier footing; as Panievsky observed, journalists can be called partisan or biased either way.

While many of this week’s readings focus on the AfD’s hostility toward migrants in general, I kept coming back to the group the party treats differently. CNN reports that the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt manifesto aims “remigration” at Ukrainian refugees, while also calling for an end to sanctions on Russia and for free Russian-language instruction. Meanwhile, the party has made no comparable push for benefit cuts or deportations aimed at Russian nationals or the Russlanddeutsche, the ethnic German returnees from the former Soviet Union.

One might expect that a party focused on opposing immigration would sort migrants by how culturally or ethnically different it considers them, which would put Ukrainians among the more “acceptable” groups. Instead, the line seems to follow the party’s foreign policy. I’m not sure whether that reflects sympathy for (or influence from) Russia, the importance of Russian-German voters in the east, or something else. I’d like to know how Ukrainian refugees in places like Saxony-Anhalt read the AfD’s position, and whether Russian-Germans there see themselves as part of the party’s base.

The German government’s record is harder to read. Berlin has been one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters, yet Ukrainians who arrived after April 1, 2025 were downgraded from Bürgergeld to the asylum seekers’ rate, and this summer’s “Grundsicherung” reform added stricter sanctions on top of that. The Interior Ministry frames these changes as a push towards employment, which could seem reasonable on its own. But Ukrainians were the one group never required to take German classes, so tying benefits more closely to finding work seems to penalize them for a gap the government’s policies helped create. My interview with Anastasiia for the news piece also raised questions for me about how individual German employers may be raising their typical standards for Ukrainian applicants. I wondered whether anyone in the ministry made that connection, or whether the cuts were mostly a response to political pressure to cut Ukraine assistance.

Given the frequent comparisons with MAGA, I’m also curious whether the AfD’s position overlaps with skepticism toward Ukraine aid on the American right, and whether the two movements influence each other on this.

For me, the Ukraine case shows that a refugee’s status can depend on politics far removed from their own situation. Ukrainians arrived in Germany under more generous terms than any other group. If German support for Ukraine weakens, or the AfD gains more power, their position could change regardless of anything they have done. That seems like an interesting question to explore in Berlin, especially in conversations with Ukrainians who have had different experiences with German government assistance and private employment opportunities.

I have a few ideas that I’d like to pursue in Berlin. One topic I’m drawn to is LGBTQ Afghan refugees. There is a Berlin-based organization called Rainbow Afghanistan that was founded by exiled Afghan LGBTQ activists, and I plan to reach out to ask whether any members will talk with me. This seems like a complex story – fleeing to Berlin may offer LGBTQ Afghans freedoms and opportunities that were not available in Afghanistan, but this would also alienate them from their own diaspora. Especially with changing German government policies towards Afghan refugees and asylum seekers, I’m curious whether they feel they can stay and how they interact with both the Afghan diaspora and the local German LGBTQ community. This may be challenging to pursue, as I imagine that many sources may be unwilling to speak on the record, and I’m not sure how much of a language barrier there will be.

I’m also interested in Syrian refugees, who have been under increasing pressure to leave Germany since Assad’s fall. Syrians who travel back to their home country can lose their German protected status, and I’m curious how this is affecting Syrians who have been building lives in Berlin for years. The LGBTQ refugee angle could also be interesting in the Syrian refugee population. I couldn’t locate a Syrian equivalent to Rainbow Afghanistan, but I did find Mahmoud Hassino, a journalist and activist who founded Mawaleh, Syria’s first LGBT magazine, before he was forced to leave the country. He now works in Berlin on projects supporting LGBT refugees, including Berlin’s first major refugee center exclusively for LGBT people. This could potentially be a way in for a story about LGBTQ refugees in Berlin across both the Afghan and Syrian communities.

My third idea is continuing reporting on Ukrainians, since my first news piece focused on Anastasiia, a Ukrainian refugee weighing whether to stay in Germany after the far right’s recent election wins. Berlin is home to the Unity Hub, which provides services to Ukrainian refugees in Germany but also seems partly meant to encourage Ukrainians to return home. Anastasiia described Germany as working “in both directions,” helping Ukrainians settle while also actively preparing for their return, and this would be an interesting tension to explore.

Once we’re in Berlin, I expect that the conversations I have (or don’t have) will narrow down my topics and point me towards a sharper story. Until then, I’ll keep doing background research and reach out to potential contacts.

Throughout these readings, I noticed that help for Afghans more often came from journalists, courts, and organizations than from the governments that had made commitments to them.

Alissa Rubin describes The New York Times scrambling in August 2021 to protect both former and current Afghan staff, since the Taliban would not care that someone had left the paper years earlier. Abdul Wahid Wafa, whose family got out through a joint effort by the Times and the Mexican government, calls the U.S. withdrawal “hasty” and “irresponsible.” He says Afghan journalists “were helped, finally, by these individuals, companies, and the civilian side. Not the American government.”

Germany’s admission program fared little better. Reuters reports that fewer than 1,600 Afghans arrived through it in two years, and it was suspended in 2025 after Friedrich Merz took office, leaving about 2,400 approved Afghans waiting in Pakistan. Kimia, a 25-year-old artist in Islamabad, told Reuters, “It’s like you just breathe, but you don’t live.”

Politico explains the reasons behind the German suspension, including pressure from the AfD and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment spurred by widely publicized attacks blamed partly on Afghan migrants. I was struck by the mixed messaging – Germany’s foreign minister promising to keep “legally binding admission commitments” while a spokesperson from the interior ministry said they were trying to “terminate voluntary admission programs to the degree possible.”

The U.S. had a much more robust evacuation and admissions program, enacted through Operations Allies Refuge, Allies Welcome, and Enduring Welcome, through which over 70,000 Afghans were initially evacuated from Kabul and nearly 200,000 in total were resettled in the U.S., compared to 36,400 in Germany.

But as I witnessed first-hand working in military-run refugee camps during Operation Allies Welcome, there was a major gap between official process and reality – and particularly after reading Azmat Khan’s series, I question how much credit should be given for a messy solution to a crisis the U.S. had a major hand in creating.

Regardless, the U.S. has now sharply restricted Afghan migration, suspending refugee admissions and barring Afghan nationals from entry. In contrast, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled earlier this year that admission pledges cannot be revoked en masse.

For me, these readings highlight the importance of watchdogs and third-party oversight. A government commitment, whether a casualty review process or an admission pledge, means little without journalists, advocates, and courts to hold officials accountable. Meanwhile, people like Kimia remain stuck in dangerous situations with their lives on hold.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has called for ending the refugee status of Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion, won the largest share of votes in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20. It was the party’s third state election victory and its second this month.

Anastasiia Yakovlieva, 25, a Ukrainian who has lived in Germany since March 2022, said the results raise questions for her. “That sometimes makes you think – do you want to stay in Germany or do you want to change your country?” she said. “Do you want to live in a society like this?”

The AfD’s national platform says refugees “need to leave Germany” and “return to their home countries.” The party’s Saxony-Anhalt chapter, which won 43.8% of the state’s vote earlier this month, has published its own manifesto calling for a mass-deportation campaign it calls “remigration” and encouraging businesses to use artificial intelligence rather than turn to “culturally alien” migrant workers, according to Reuters. Ulrich Siegmund, the lead AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, has said that “remigration applies to anyone who does not contribute to society” – a category that includes Ukrainian refugees without jobs, NPR reported.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union has ruled out working with the AfD. Germany’s domestic intelligence service monitors the party nationally as a suspected extremist organization.

Sofiia Patkanovtsiy, a Princeton University sophomore from Uzhhorod in western Ukraine, described the AfD’s victories as “distressing.” She said Ukraine is increasingly “used like a buzzword for pushing political agendas or anti-immigration sentiments.” Patkanovtsiy plans to return to Ukraine after graduating, under a commitment to the nonprofit Ukraine Global Scholars, whose scholars pledge to work in Ukraine for at least five years.

Yakovlieva is from Donetsk, which came under the control of Russian-backed forces in 2014. Her family fled to Kyiv and was living near Bucha and Irpin, outside the capital, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“I didn’t want to get encircled, and that’s why I decided to flee the war,” she said.

She left with her mother, stopping briefly in Poland before settling in Germany. Her father and brother later joined them, and her family now lives near Cologne.

Yakovlieva speaks four languages, holds project-management certifications, and is working on a second bachelor’s degree, but said, “I’m not that attractive of a worker in the German labor market.” German employers want German-issued qualifications, she said, and retraining can take years. Her first degree would qualify her to teach in Germany only after two more years of study.

Her mother holds a finance degree from a Ukrainian university and spent a decade caring for children. According to Yakovlieva, she completed a job-center training course and a month of practical training at a German kindergarten. The kindergarten then declined to hire her as an assistant because she lacked the required bachelor’s degree. Yakovlieva said some Germans work in such roles without a degree or certificate “just because they are German.”

“A lot of Ukrainians had to agree to work in lower positions than they used to work in Ukraine,” she said.

In July, EU countries agreed to extend temporary protection for people fleeing Ukraine until March 4, 2028. More than 4 million people have received that protection since 2022. The status stems from an EU-wide decision, not from national or state governments.

Yakovlieva holds a residence permit under that temporary-protection provision. She said her employer, an American company, cannot provide the documents she would need for a German work visa.

In about six months, she said, she will be able to choose between applying for German citizenship and seeking permanent residency, which would require changing jobs.

“It’s in [Germany’s] interest to keep the people here,” Yakovlieva said. “I think when the time comes, they will be trying to provide an opportunity for those who want to stay.”

In the Reuters podcast, Christian Lowe describes a night of Russian drone attacks on Kyiv, listening to the whine and waiting for it to fade. “If it doesn’t, then you need to be worried.” In a WWII air-raid bunker in Berlin, visitors to the new Ukraine Museum get a few seconds of that feeling, “targeted” by a Russian drone camera as they enter.  This contrast made me consider who stays in Ukraine and experiences the real-life version.

The Ukrainians who stay in these readings are largely men. Deb’s article profiles civilian volunteers, “judges by day and drone killers by night,” manning antiquated machine guns. One of them, Andrian, explains why he’s there: “We have children. We have a family.” The refugees in the Berlin readings appear mostly as statistics, and according to the UN, most people who fled Ukraine were women and children – as high as 90% in the first months of the war.

This could be read as courage versus flight, but it seems that the main sorting factor is the law. Under martial law, until August of last year, most Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 were barred from leaving the country. This gave me a new perspective on Deb’s piece. The volunteers she profiles are brave, but most couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. The law decided that they must stay, and they chose what to do about it.

The law changed in August 2025, when Kyiv raised the lower end of the age bracket to 23. In Germany, weekly registrations of male Ukrainian refugees aged 18-22 skyrocketed. In response, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to “ensure that young men… do not come to Germany in ever-increasing numbers, but rather serve in their own country.”

Merz’s quote sent me back to the Kyiv Independent piece from earlier that year, when Ukraine and Germany agreed to open a “Unity Hub” in Berlin. It promised Ukrainians education and career opportunities and help for “those who want to return.” By then, Germany had spent more than 20 billion euros on Ukrainian refugees. This support was built around the people that Ukraine’s exit ban had let out, mostly women and children. But when young men started arriving, the chancellor asked Ukraine to keep them. I’m left wondering who exactly Germany’s welcome was for.

External sources:

https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-russia-war-germany-refugees-young-men-protection/a-74562374

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20251113-merz-asks-zelensky-to-ensure-fewer-young-ukrainian-men-come-to-germany

https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2022/05/rapid-gender-analysis-of-ukraine

In 2021, shortly after the last American plane left Kabul, I found myself working on a desolate stretch of New Mexico desert somewhere between Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range. Over ten thousand Afghan refugees were living in a temporary settlement that had been thrown up in just a few weeks. The area had until recently been used as a training range for artillery and small arms. Wind lifted the dusty ground and turned over scattered piles of spent ammunition. Hundreds of diesel generators roared day and night. Black Hawks tore low across the sky. The port-a-potties baked in the sun, overflowing into lagoons of waste that dried into twenty-foot wafers, and I wrote reports about it. 

We were instructed to only call them guests. Not refugees, or asylum seekers, or Afghans. 

Soldiers and contractors told me about the opium rings and the child marriages supposedly running in the tents, though nobody seemed to have actually witnessed any of it. Most of the guests had been doctors, lawyers, translators, government officials. Now, they were just foreigners in tents. Maybe the rumors made the conditions easier to stomach. 

In The New Arab’s article, the first talk of Syrians going home from Germany came within hours after Assad’s fall. Alice Weidel posted that anybody celebrating a free Syria on a street in Berlin “evidently no longer has a reason to flee.” Bavaria’s interior minister put it more graciously: the well-integrated remain welcome, while the rest should be helped back. 

Three months later, the Washington Post counted some 6,000 Syrian doctors propping up German hospitals, and the same ministry that had suspended asylum decisions was warning that whole areas of the health sector were dependent on these Syrians. 

Kingsley offers a more intimate and striking view of the machinery that refugees must navigate. The New Odyssey opens with Hashem al-Souki in a smuggler’s boat on the night of his son’s birthday, unable to see the people around him and able only to hear them.

Loubna Mrie ends up inside the machinery from the other side. Months after her mother is disappeared by her own father’s men, she is flown to a donor-funded “civil society workshop” in an Istanbul hotel. She realizes she was invited because she is Alawite — exactly what the donors wanted to see. She is not there to be taught. She is there as evidence that the intervention is working.

I wrote environmental inspection reports, and I understood who they were for. 

The first secret Frances Brogan ever kept was that she could read. Her mother, Meagan, was reading aloud when three-year-old Frances interrupted and asked to read the next part. “I asked her, have you been reading for a long time?” Meagan recalled. “And she said yes, but she hadn’t told me because she was afraid I’d stop reading to her if I knew she could read by herself.”

Meagan’s proud stories of her daughter’s youth reveal an early fascination with social experiences and human connection. She laughed as she described how Frances began speaking before her peers. “She was this little tiny baby talking to people. She made the other babies cry, because she’d be like, ‘Hi! What’s your name?’ She was very intense.” At a year and a half, Frances realized that the other children on the playground wouldn’t respond to her insistent introductions, so she began approaching their parents instead. As a toddler, she asked her mother to draw family trees and friend trees, tracing out the invisible lines connecting the people around her. 

Today, Frances is in her final year at Princeton, her sights set on journalism once she graduates. She is managing editor of the Daily Princetonian; she reads New Yorker articles on the incline treadmill at the gym; she spent the past summer reporting on the ground in Palestine and Israel, despite her friends’ concerns for her safety. And in a rigorous environment where the academic and the social are often seen as separate or even at odds, Frances has cultivated an intellectual life that is fundamentally social. 

Frances’ friend Sofia, also a Princeton senior, said that their bond first solidified freshman year, during a coffee meetup that turned into an hours-long conversation. Anna Karenina, Sofia noted, was one of many topics they discussed. “Frances has a tendency of making friendships that way. She’s a good conversationalist. She has a way of asking questions and making you think deeply about things.”

Anna Karenina is one of Frances’ favorite books, an example of the sweeping epics that she gravitates toward, though she reads voraciously through everything she finds interesting. “She loves a meaty engagement,” Meagan said, “and then she loves to have someone to talk about it with. She’s a very intense conversationalist.” Frances, her mother said, is drawn to the emotional and social aspects of learning as much as the learning itself — like she did as a toddler, when she hid her ability to read for fear of losing out on the shared experience. 

From a young age, Frances took firm positions on causes from geopolitics to environmentalism to feminism. Her father was a professor and a Catholic, and they often found themselves on opposing sides of issues, engaging in heated debate over religion and morality. He passed away when Frances was 13. “It’s tragic that she lost her dad,” Meagan said, “but part of the tragedy is that they can’t continue that conversation. She has to do it in her head.” 

Whether in her head or with the people around her, Frances is continuing these conversations. “I care and think a lot about how to live an ethical life,” she said. “I can be an asshole, and I gossip, and I’ll be mean to my siblings — so I try to morally commit where I can.” 

Frances sees her mother as a defining role model — for her strength and resilience but also for her authenticity. Though Frances views herself as having “a pathologic need to be liked,” she admires how her mother never seems to code-switch or act like anyone other than her true self. Meagan recalled feeling similar when she was Frances’ age, struggling to know if she was being herself. But she has a different perspective on her daughter. “I don’t think she’s very good at contorting herself. I don’t think that’s a skill she’s ever developed, and I don’t think she ever will. She may not know it, but she is very authentic. I think that’s her lot in life — to be herself.”

Interviewer: Jasper Gebhardt

Interviewee: Frances Brogan

Frances Brogan was four when she realized that the chicken on her plate and the chicken in the picture book were the same animal. Now a Princeton senior, she hasn’t eaten one since.