With country expected to receive 800,000 applications this year, here’s how fellow European member states shape up by comparison

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Germany is expected to receive 800,000 asylum seekers this year – about four times the number it took last year and more than all other EU member states combined received in 2014.

That figure represents about 1% of Germany’s population.

This is how many asylum applications other EU member countries would need to receive to match the same proportion:

Among the 28 EU member states only Sweden comes anywhere near the same level, based on its 2014 figures.

Relative to population size, the Nordic country received the greatest share of the EU’s 626,000 asylum seekers last year.

However, the number of asylum seekers does not necessarily equate to the number of people that will be granted refugee status or allowed to stay in a country.

For example, in Hungary – one of the countries with the highest share of asylum seekers – fewer than 10% of cases last year resulted in a positive decision. Of the 358,010 cases assessed in the EU last year, about 45% had a positive outcome. The rate in Germany was 42%, while in Sweden it was 77%.

In July, Germany received 37,531 asylum applications, a 93% increase compared with the same month last year.

Although the increase in the numbers across Europe is primarily driven by the thousands of refugees fleeing conflicts and poverty in north Africa and the Middle East, a significant share of the applications in the EU are from elsewhere. Nearly 40% of applications filed in Germany last month came from people arriving from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro.

In the first six months of this year, more than 400,000 asylum applications were lodged across EU member states, according to Eurostat data. Some 43% of these were in Germany, 67,000 in Hungary, and 29,000, 26,500 and 25,000 in Sweden, France and Italy respectively. By comparison, the UK has received fewer than 9,500.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, told German television this week that the refugee crisis will concern “us [Europe] far more than Greece and the stability of the euro”.

However, most of the rest of Europe has so far fallen short of the required effort. Earlier this year, member states missed their own targets, which were based on various criteria including population and economic factors such as wealth levels and unemployment rates, to relocate 40,000 migrants from Greece and Italy after hundreds of migrants died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Libya.

Germany, France and the Netherlands agreed to take on the highest number of these migrants. As a percentage of a country’s population, the UK’s commitment (0.003%) is the second lowest among EU members (after Hungary, which has refused to welcome any). On this measure, Luxembourg (0.064%), Cyprus (0.028%) and Ireland (0.024%) are taking the most.

Between 2,000 and 5,000 migrants have reached Calais, which is between 1% and 2.5% of the more than 200,000 who have landed in Italy and Greece.

Commenting on the 800,000 projection, Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said his government was not fazed by the estimate.

This year’s figures are set to surpass the 1992 peak of 672,000 asylum applicants across EU member states, spurred by the war in former Yugoslavia.