I have spent 15 years writing about people’s fear. On Wednesday, 17 June 2026, in Brussels, the fear became mine.
When the European Parliament passed its new Return Regulation — by 418 votes to 218 — what unsettled me was not the result. I am a journalist; I read the drafts, I followed the negotiations, and I expected the law.
What I did not expect was the sound that followed: rows of elected members rising to chant, in unison, “Send them back.” A celebration. A roar.
I am a Middle Eastern and North African journalist — Egyptian, Muslim, and, through part of my family, of Semitic descent. I work in Berlin. I am, by every measure, one of “them.”
The ‘Aryan ideal’ rears its ugly head
And for the first time in three years, sitting with that footage replaying, I felt a fear I thought I had outrun: a sudden, physical wariness of any man whose face fit the picture of what an older, darker Europe once called the “Aryan” ideal.
To be precise about that fear: it is collective memory. It comes from years of reading German history, of standing in the places where the idea that one people ranks above another started with chant then became a law. I had read those archives as a researcher, at a professional distance.
On Wednesday, that distance collapsed. The triggers I thought were filed away — in my mind, in my chest, in the way I now glance at strangers on the U-Bahn — rose at once.
I come from Egypt — a country that hosts millions of displaced people and harbours its own hostility toward African migrants, blamed for failures that are not theirs.
I know how economic anxiety curdles into scapegoating, and the political theatre of it: the hunt for a villain who cannot vote you out. I expected slogans against rival parties, against opposing agendas. That is the ordinary, survivable cruelty of politics.
But “them” and “back” are different words. They name a category of human beings. They are aimed at me, and at my neighbours, and at the woman who cleans the office and the doctor who treated my friend and the child in my German class. A slogan against a policy can be argued with. A slogan against a people can only be obeyed or refused.
Migration and racism are the focus of my work, so I cannot let the chant pass without naming two facts.
The first: “them” do not only burden Germany — they sustain it. With an ageing population and shortages it cannot fill from within, the country needs, by its own estimates, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers a year over the coming decade; much of its workforce growth over the past 15 years has come from people without German passports.
Only recently, chancellor Friedrich Merz made an explicit appeal for broad, globally sourced labour migration: “We need qualified immigration,” he said, emphasising that Germany aims to present itself as “an open, free, liberal, tolerant country” that welcomes people “from all parts of the world who are ready to work.”
Which I don’t know how that fits with the ‘Send Them Back!’
The second is the word “back.”
Back to where? For many there is no stable place to return to — and Germany is not always a distant observer of why. There are countries it once colonised, with consequences that outlived colonial rule; present-day conflicts in which it plays a part through the arms and alliances it provides; and protection commitments it made and remains bound by.
As an example, Afghanistan: Germany pledged admission to local staff, journalists, judges and human rights defenders who had worked alongside its institutions, then left thousands stranded when the new government suspended the programme.
Its own former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, put it plainly: “We recognise our special responsibility towards the Afghans – and particularly towards those whom we promised to welcome in Germany.”
Such responsibility does not lapse because a parliament finds it inconvenient. To chant “back” is to wish people toward situations that European policy, Germany’s included, has at times helped to shape.
What frightens me most is not that some politicians believe this, but that they felt safe enough to chant it aloud, joyfully, inside the institution built to prevent exactly this.
The European Union was assembled on the wreckage of the last continent that organised itself around “them” and “back.” Its treaties promise protection, security and freedom — not as charity, but as the hard-won conclusion of its own catastrophe.
Wednesday’s chant does not only threaten migrants; it breaks the promise the Union makes to itself, and plants in millions of us a question we never asked before: the freedoms, the coexistence, the equality Europe once held out to us — were they ever meant for us, or only lent on condition?
Today I’m going to my work in Germany feeling, for the first time, afraid of people. Sadly.
