German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has appointed Ulrike Hornung to oversee migration matters within the ministry, a key role central to Dobrindt’s flagship policy agenda that had remained empty for months.
Hornung will lead the Migration, Refugee and Return Policy Department, several German media outlets reported on Tuesday, citing an internal agency memo. Her appointment ends weeks of speculation over who would take the job.
She will be tasked with helping deliver the Christian Democrat-led German government’s promises of a major policy reversal on immigration, or a Migrationswende. A career civil servant, she has held numerous senior posts at the interior ministry, including within the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged tougher migration rules during the election campaign earlier this year, and Dobrindt in particular is seen as a migration hardliner within the Christian Democrats.
The post has been vacant since May after Dobrindt sent the department’s previous chief, Ulrich Weinbrenner, into early retirement shortly after being sworn in as minister.
Weinbrenner, a long-serving official, had worked under ministers from both the centre-left Social Democrats and the centre-right Christian Democrats, including during the tenures of former chancellors Olaf Scholz and Angela Merkel.
His lengthy experience and association with past governments was a potential problem for Dobrindt and other conservative hawks, who have pushed for a sharp break with decades of German migration policy – a central issue in the country’s political debate.
Ulrike Hornung takes over as Germany moves to implement the EU’s new asylum pact, approved by the German cabinet last week. Dobrindt hailed the deal as proof that Germany is leading on migration policy, although the measures still need parliamentary approval.
Meanwhile, legal challenges over asylum decisions are rising sharply, even as the number of first-time asylum applications have plunged, according to a recent analysis from the Deutsche Richterzeitung legal journal.
Courts registered more than 76,000 new lawsuits challenging asylum decisions in the first half of 2025, more than in all of 2023 – although the number of first-time asylum applications dropped by half over that same time period.
Berlin has also angered neighbours by again extending “temporary” border checks beyond the 15 September deadline.
(bts)
