Germany’s new chancellor has blamed antisemitism on “big numbers of migrants”, causing outrage in the country due to the German people’s role in the Jewish Holocaust.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), dismissed antisemitism as an “imported” problem, despite the country’s historic crimes against the Jewish people.

Merz tried to attribute a rise in ‘antisemitic crimes’, much of it related to Israel, to immigrantion, amid a wave of anger in Europe over the bloody war on Gaza.

“We are doing everything we can to bring these numbers down. We are prosecuting those who are against the law. And frankly, we have a sort of imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years, and we have to tackle this and we have to resolve this problem,” he told Fox News during a recent visit to the US.

“I would like to make it very clear, that the German government, and the vast majority of the German parliament, is strictly against antisemitism and against these people and we are doing everything we can to bring these numbers down.”

Merz, who was elected chancellor in May, is viewed as Germany’s most pro-Israel and right-wing leader in a generation. Despite this, he recently criticised Israel’s tactics in the war on Gaza as “incomprehensible“.

It comes amid a reported rise in antisemitic crimes in Germany, with 8,627 incidents taking place last year, a 77 percent increase on 2023 figures.

Of them, 5,857 of the crimes were classified as “antisemitism related to Israel”, with 544 cases attributed to far-right extremists.

Antisemitism is an extremely sensitive issue in Germany, due to the Nazis’ murder of 6 million European Jews during the Second World War. 

Criticism of Israel is viewed by many in Germany as antisemitic, despite objections from many Jewish groups, while pro-Palestine protests since the start of the war on Gaza have been frequently suppressed by police.

Since 1945, antisemitism in Germany has been primarily viewed as a far-right phenomenon until a rise of immigration from Muslim-majority countries, many of whom are critical of Israeli war crimes, saw the supposed issue of so-called “imported antisemitism” come to the fore.

Muslim and migrant groups have condemned the term, viewing it as racist and ignorant of historic and contemporary European antisemitism.