Angela Merkel’s government urged to relax law requiring people to live in Germany for eight years before being eligible for citizenship

The German Green party has called on the government of Angela Merkel to fast-track the applications of Britons wishing to become German citizens in the light of the UK’s vote to leave the EU.



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Volker Beck, a leading member of the party, told the Bundestag that Germany should “send a signal that Britons belong to Europe and to Germany” by allowing the “swift and straightforward naturalisation” of British citizens.

The opposition Greens tabled the resolution having already written to the government over the summer requesting a reform of the citizenship law because it said that young Britons in particular who were living and working in Germany “need a clear perspective that they can stay” in the event of Britain leaving the EU.

A heated debate in the German parliament on Friday revealed the extent to which the Brexit vote and the uncertainty surrounding Britain’s future relationship with the European Union continues to vex and anger German politicians across the spectrum.

Beck said that 5,000 Britons had received German citizenship last year and there were many others who wished to apply among the more than 100,000 other UK citizens living in the country. But many were not eligible, he said, because they had not lived in the country for the eight years the current law recommended or were not earning the level of income required to prove they could support themselves.

Beck called on the German government to “change its spots” and create a “modern citizenship law” that would allow people to hold more than one citizenship. Currently, this is only possible in exceptional cases.

Once Britain leaves the EU, Britons would be unable to become German citizens without first renouncing their British citizenship, hence the Greens’ attempts to speed up the process that would allow Britons to become German and remain British.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Merkel’s conservatives argued against the proposal to fast-track British applications for German citizenship. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

But the proposal was met with stiff resistance by politicians from chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.

Stephan Mayer of the Christian Social Union called Beck’s proposal “treasonous” and accused him of “pushing a policy of the forced Germanisation of Britons in Germany”.

He said that any discussion concerning Brexit was “premature and pointless, as long as the negotiations [regarding the conditions of exiting the EU] are still ongoing”.

“For the time being we need to view the issue with typical British dispassion,” he told parliament.

He said British citizens already “get all the rights they need here, apart from being able to vote”.

But Rüdiger Veit of the Social Democrats (SPD) hit back. “It’s not about a forced Germanisation of Britons; it’s to do with the fact they’re very welcome here and it would be a happy situation if as many of them who want to beome German citizens did,” he said.

Tim Ostermann, who is MP for Herford in North Rhine Westphalia, a base for the British forces in Germany until last year, said he had not received any complaints from British citizens who had chosen to stay in the area that they had had any difficulties in acquiring citizenship.

“I never heard from any ex-British soldiers that they had any problems,” he said, calling the Greens’ proposal “an overreaction”.

Germany would have “far bigger problems” to deal with than Britons’ citizenshiponce the Brexit negotiations began, Detlef Müller of the SPD said, adding that Germany and the EU “face extremely complicated negotiations” with Britain “even if the blonde and blue-eyed Boris Johnson would like to see it differently”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The German, British and European Union flags fly in Berlin. Photograph: Adam Berry/Getty Images

Marian Wendt of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) said there was a danger that British citizens would receive preferential treatment which would put other EU members at a disadvantage. “I think a ‘Lex Britannica’ is a very bad idea,” he said, adding that he feared Britons would apply for a German passport only in order to avoid being a “nicht-Schengen Schlangen Steher” (“having to stand in the non-Schengen passport queue”) rather than out of a sense of loyalty or true conviction that they wanted to be German.

For well over an hour the MPs debated the issue in often fractious exchanges, which also touched on the issues of integrating refugees and easing citizenship rules for other nationalities who had been long-term resident in Germany, such as Turks.

In a closing address, Barbara Woltmann of the CDU warned that giving special treatment to Britons would send out the wrong signal by rewarding the “abuse of direct democracy”, in reference to the EU referendum. “After all, charlatans persuaded people to make a bad decision based on false information,” she said.



Further reflecting the extent to which the issues surrounding Brexit concern the German public, the tabloid Bild marked the three months since the referendum by featuring a “Brexit Balance” on page two of its Friday edition. It concluded with the warning from leading economist Marcel Fratzscher that “the long-term costs of Brexit will probably be much higher than originally feared because what is becoming increasingly clear is that there will hardly be any compromise on continuing to give the British good access to the single market”.

Katrin Göring-Eckardt, chair of the Greens, told the Guardian on the sidelines of the debate: “It’s inconceivable that the 107,000 well-integrated Britons in Germany would be sent back to Britain ... because of the Brexit tragedy, which is why the Greens have tabled this motion.”