Why Germany’s antigypsyism matters for all of Europe: MIA 2025 Report

The figure – 2,076 incidents – marks a 24% increase compared with the previous year. But the report is not simply a story of rising numbers. It is also a story of what becomes visible when Roma and Sinti communities have somewhere to report discrimination, and when civil society has the resources to document it.

That distinction matters. Antigypsyism is often underreported, normalised, or treated as too vague to record. MIA’s data helps show what many Roma and Sinti people already know from daily life: discrimination is not limited to isolated acts of hate. It appears in any area of our daily lives – in schools, housing, public offices, online spaces, media narratives, and interactions with police.

For an international audience, the findings are not only relevant because they concern Germany. They are relevant because the patterns are recognisable across Europe.

Official statistics capture only part of the reality

One of the starkest findings is the gap between official police data and civil society monitoring.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office recorded 240 antigypsyist criminal offences in preliminary statistics on politically motivated crime. MIA identified 480 incidents involving criminal offences – more than twice as many.

This is not just a technical difference between reporting systems. It points to a deeper problem: antigypsyist motives are often missed, minimised, or not recorded.

The report notes that antigypsyism is increasingly expressed through coded language. Terms such as “clan structures”, “begging mafia”, “travelling offenders” or “extended families” can be used as indirect references to Roma and Sinti people, while avoiding explicit racist wording. This makes such incidents easier to deny and harder for institutions to recognise.

If the racist motive is not recorded, the harm becomes smaller on paper than it is in real life. Communities are then told, through statistics and silence, that what they experience does not fully count.

Antigypsyism is not only physical violence

The largest category of incidents documented by MIA was not physical violence, but verbal and non-verbal stereotyping and degradation.

In 2025, MIA recorded 1,193 such cases, representing 57% of all incidents. These included insults, propaganda, degrading public statements, romanticising stereotypes, and other forms of humiliation.

This finding is important because racism is often taken seriously only when it becomes physically violent. But degrading language is not harmless, as it shapes the climate in which exclusion becomes acceptable.

When Roma and Sinti people are repeatedly portrayed as criminal, dirty, dishonest, dependent, foreign or “not integrated”, those influence how teachers treat children, how landlords assess applicants, how police conduct checks, how journalists frame stories, and how neighbours interpret everyday behaviour.

The report also points to the role of bystanders. In more than half of verbal-attack cases in which third parties were present, witnesses either remained passive or sided with the perpetrators. Silence, in these situations, is not neutral, but can reinforce the message that antigypsyist abuse is socially tolerated.

Public authorities are a major setting of discrimination

MIA documented 738 discrimination cases in 2025. Many involved public authorities, including police, job centres, municipal administrations, youth welfare offices, social welfare offices and immigration authorities.

Contact with authorities was the most frequently documented area of life, with 428 incidents. Police authorities were particularly prominent. Reported cases included disproportionate controls, house searches, antigypsyist insults during operations, discriminatory investigations and refusal or reluctance to register complaints.

Other public offices also appear throughout the report. In job centres and welfare offices, affected people reported degrading communication, disproportionate bureaucratic demands, repeated requests for documents already submitted, and benefits withheld on unfounded grounds.

These administrative problems usually have very immediate consequences: loss of income, inability to pay rent, housing insecurity, or homelessness. Antigypsyism is not only committed by private individuals, but also reproduced by institutions and by people acting in official roles.

Children encounter antigypsyism early

The impact on children is among the most serious findings.

MIA recorded 452 cases involving children under 18. Of these, 305 involved children under the age of 14. For many Roma children, antigypsyism appears at school, in public services, in housing environments, and in public spaces.

Education was the second most frequently documented area, with 364 incidents, most of them occurring in schools. These included bullying by classmates, discriminatory treatment by school staff, institutional segregation, and unjustified placement in special education.

In 57% of education-related incidents, the perpetrators were people in official roles, such as teachers, school social workers or school administrators.

This should alarm policymakers. Schools should be places of safety and opportunity, but instead, for too many Roma and Sinti children, they become places where stereotypes are repeated, expectations are lowered, and exclusion begins early. The consequences of this are long-term, as discrimination in childhood can shape educational pathways, trust in institutions, mental health and future opportunities.

Housing remains a frontline of exclusion

The 2025 report places special focus on housing. Between 2022 and 2025, MIA documented 903 housing-related antigypsyist incidents. In 2025 alone, there were 279 such cases.

Discrimination often begins during the search for accommodation. Roma may be rejected because of their surname or assumed background. Landlords may rely on stereotypes about “clans”, noise, criminality or financial unreliability.

For those who do find housing, the discrimination may continue. MIA found that many incidents occur in the immediate residential environment, often involving neighbours. Complaints about children’s noise, waste disposal or alleged failure to “adapt” can escalate into pressure from landlords, municipal housing companies or authorities.

This is how exclusion often works in practice. A rumour becomes a complaint. A complaint becomes a warning. A warning becomes a threat of eviction. And so the home, which should be a place of safety, becomes another site of insecurity.

The report also highlights the situation of Ukrainian Roma refugees. One in four analysed housing-related cases took place in refugee shelters, almost exclusively affecting Ukrainian Roma. MIA describes overcrowded and segregated accommodation, discrimination by staff, barriers to healthcare and schooling, and, in some cases, files marked with an “R” for Roma. Similarly to many European countries, in Germany Roma refugees from Ukraine have often faced double discrimination: as people displaced by war, and as Roma.

Online hate is becoming more visible

For the first time, MIA recorded more online incidents than housing incidents: 292 cases in 2025.

These included hate speech, threats, antigypsyist propaganda and Holocaust denial. Many posts reached large audiences. Even when they were not directed at specific individuals, they contributed to a wider climate in which antigypsyist narratives are normalised and amplified.

MIA also notes that the real scale of online antigypsyism is likely higher, as monitoring capacities remain limited.

As we have recorded in TAAO project, the online hate does not stay online. It feeds political discourse, shapes public attitudes, and can encourage discrimination and violence offline.

Media and political narratives matter

The report also examines the role of media and politics in spreading antigypsyist stereotypes.

Media coverage often relies on sensationalist framing, repeats statements by law enforcement or residents without sufficient scrutiny, and leaves out the voices of Roma and Sinti people themselves. This creates a familiar pattern: Roma are spoken about, accused or problematised, but rarely heard.

Political discourse also plays a role. MIA documented 151 incidents in the political sphere, including speeches, parliamentary inquiries, party events and social media posts by politicians, and many involved representatives of the Alternative for Germany.

Change is possible when antigypsyism is challenged

The report does not only document harm. It also shows that intervention can work.

After criticism from a Sinto activist and intervention by MIA, a museum changed the title of a theatre production that had used an antigypsyist slur. A police department apologised and revised a press release that had unnecessarily identified a suspect as Roma. A sports club expelled a member who had shared Nazi-era antigypsyist content. The German Press Council upheld a complaint against reporting that portrayed Ukrainian Roma refugees as fraudulent “fake Ukrainians”.

These cases do not erase the scale of the problem, but they show that accountability is possible when affected communities are heard, civil society is resourced, and institutions are pushed to respond.

They also show that change does not always begin with large reforms: sometimes it starts with a complaint, a correction, a public challenge, or the refusal to let racist language pass unnoticed.

What needs to change

Reporting infrastructure needs long-term funding, not short-term project support. MIA’s report illustrates how important structure is for monitoring and reporting.

Independent complaint bodies and ombudspersons are needed in schools, police and social administration. Public officials need systematic, community-led training on antigypsyism. Housing and eviction practices must be reformed so that enforcement does not leave vulnerable families homeless. Hate crime tracking must improve, including the recognition of coded antigypsyist motives.

These recommendations are relevant beyond Germany. Across Europe, Roma communities continue to face a gap between formal equality and lived reality. The law may promise protection, but reporting systems, public institutions and political narratives often fail to deliver it.

MIA’s report echoes ERGO Networks’s ongoing narrative that antigypsyism is not accidental or confined to open hate, but is reproduced through institutions, public narratives and daily decisions that determine who is believed, who is protected, who gets housed, who gets educated and who is treated as belonging.

Reports like this do more than simply count the incidents; they make denying those incidents harder.