Germany scraps fast-track citizenship route as incoming coalition resets migration policy

# Germany scraps fast-track citizenship route as incoming coalition resets migration policy

Event date: 2025-04-10. Germany’s next government is moving to reverse one of the most closely watched parts of last year’s citizenship reform, ending the three-year fast-track route for highly integrated immigrants while preserving the broader five-year path.

According to the coalition agreement reported in the evidence packet, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party plan to abolish the expedited path that was introduced under the outgoing government. That route had allowed certain applicants to seek German nationality after three years, provided they met a high bar for integration, including advanced German language skills and signs of strong participation in society.

The packet says the standard route for citizenship after five years of continuous residence will remain. It also says dual citizenship will continue to be permitted, despite earlier conservative criticism of the previous reform. The new coalition has apparently decided not to pursue a rollback of dual nationality, even though that issue had been a point of political tension.

The policy shift matters because the three-year route was one of the signature changes in a broader naturalization reform passed by the prior coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats. That reform lowered the entry point for citizenship and helped drive a rise in applications, especially among Germany’s large Turkish community, according to the source.

The evidence packet says conservative critics had branded the fast-track option “turbo” naturalization and argued that three years was too short a period for German nationality. The incoming coalition’s move suggests those arguments carried weight in negotiations with the SPD, even though the latter had helped enact the reform less than a year earlier.

What remains unchanged is also important. Applicants will still be able to seek citizenship after five years, with a B1 level of German. That means Germany is not retreating entirely from the 2024 reform. Rather, it is narrowing the most accelerated route while leaving the main structure intact.

The packet also notes that the coalition is not pursuing a plan to strip naturalized dual citizens of citizenship, an idea that had been floated in earlier discussions around how to deal with extremists or people accused of supporting terrorism or antisemitism. Instead, the new government will look at possible changes to expel non-citizens who call for the abolition of the democratic order.

This is therefore less a wholesale reversal than a selective correction. The five-year route survives, dual citizenship survives and the incoming coalition appears to be trying to draw a firmer line around the fastest path to naturalization. For applicants, the practical effect will be that Germany’s doors remain open, but not quite as quickly as the outgoing government had made them.