The plans, hatched by Sweden’s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes.
The concept also made a cameo in Germany’s February election after Friedrich Merz – whose centre-right CDU/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot – told the newspaper Welt it should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.
The proposal was swiftly criticised, with one political commentator pointing out that it would result in some being “Germans on probation” for their entire lives. “They can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime – and their Germanness is gone,” the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “It doesn’t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.”
Merz’s idea, she added, had laid bare the normalisation of “racist discrimination” in that, “in other words,” he was calling for remigration – the concept long-peddled by far-right, anti-immigrant parties and which, in Germany, calls for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with German citizenship.
“You are now a citicen of this county just like any other*”
*we can take this away unlike for the once that were born here
Oh, the Germanity
It is interesting to see how users here complain about Germany, when in Switzerland this practice is common since decades. Rarely heard that in Switzerland a foreigner did something atrocious and when, then, well, the Swiss passport is gone for sure with - often - a ban for years to enter the country. Result: little troubles with foreigners and efforts to from their side to be part of the Swiss society. Considering the fact that Switzerland has more foreigners than Germany, I think this procedure added to the success of Switzerland in terms of migration.
You can’t appease xenophobic citizens, they always want more … one day they will come for you.
In Stephen Harper-era Canada, they debated a denaturalisation law that would allow citizenship to be stripped from anyone who was entitled to another citizenship and who was convicted of a serious crime. Commentators pointed out that this could result in Canadian-born activists arrested for taking part in a protest in which property was damaged being deported to Israel if they had a Jewish grandparent.
If this principle is applied in Germany, it would be feasible for them to deport a German-born single citizen to Israel for calling Israel an apartheid state (i.e. IHRA-definition antisemitism).
Imagine having dual Swedish and German citizenship, and being stripped of both at the same time. Imagine how fucked you’d be in that situation. Can you still work and access banking services? Can you legally move about in the Schengen area? I know my country fast tracks citizenship for stateless persons, but I can’t find a lot of information about what to do in the meantime.
Man, Hungary has already implemented this law with the reduction of gathering rights. The government was campaigning along the lines of speeding past Europe… I guess they weren’t lying.
I guess I am happy to see other countries facing similar threats, if only to realize that many Hungarians are just people like them, barely able to do anything in the face of such coordinated attacks.
In Hungary it is more about ‘inside enemies’ than weeding out migrants. That propaganda doesn’t work anymore, because the government needs to bring in extra workers from the far east, as nobody local is willing to work for such wages.
Stay on your toes and place your hate in the right place, if you need to hang onto it. They make it sound nationalistic, but I think it’s just plain old class war.
