"We have succeeded in organizing another deportation flight with convicted criminals to Afghanistan," German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said in a press release on July 18, following the departure of a plane from Leipzig to Kabul with 81 Afghan men with failed asylum applications and criminal convictions on board.

As Dobrindt sees it, this flight means that the governing coalition of the center-right bloc of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has made good on its promise.

"We will start deporting people to Afghanistan and Syria, beginning with criminals and dangerous individuals," they wrote in their coalition agreement earlier this year.

Deportation flights had already been conducted under the previous center-left government, which lost the general election on February 23, 2025.

Nevertheless, Dobrindt (CSU) spoke of a "policy shift" — with reference to the "repatriation offensive." The plan is to put more pressure on countries to take back their citizens. In the case of Afghanistan, this is particularly tricky and sensitive because Germany has not officially recognized the Taliban as a legitimate........

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