Frau Merkel Sounds the Retreat from the Immigration Battlefield
[guest post by JVW]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who took nearly six months to stitch together a very shaky government after her party suffered major losses in last September’s election, has agreed to the demands of her coalition partner the Christian Social Union (CSU) to tighten the rules governing asylum seekers, including housing many of them in camps set up at Germany’s border while they await processing instead of permitting them to travel throughout Germany. This represents a significant backtracking from the policy that Chancellor Merkel pushed on Germany — and, by extension, on continental Europe — three years ago. Under the proposed policy, those who first enter Europe via Greece or Italy or Albania or Croatia or wherever can no longer trek straight to the border and enter refugee-accommodating Germany or Sweden, they must instead wait in the camp at the border while their status is determined. Germany’s Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, has promised his CSU allies that the new policy will allow closer vetting and make it easier for migrants whose refugee application is rejected to be sent back to their home countries or somewhere else in Europe (think of another German-speaking nation on Germany’s southern border).
This new proposal still needs the blessing of the more left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD), the third player in the coalition government, who is arguing for a liberal policy at the German border coupled with greater aid to Italy and Greece to allow more refugees to remain there, as well as calling for greater border control overall at the shores of Europe. In other words, the SPD hopes to punt the matter off to the coastal states while paying lip service to combatting “the root of the problem” causing people to emigrate to Europe. While the SPD claims that talks are “making progress,” they have temporarily been suspended until Thursday so that the German leaders can celebrate America’s Independence Day. All of this, largely to prevent the immigration restrictionists from the Alliance for Germany Party (AfD) from making further gains at the expense of the traditional German center-right.
Chancellor Merkel has largely virtue-signaled and blundered through this whole immigration imbroglio, but don’t discount her ability to survive with a politically clever solution. Though apparently Austria has not yet been officially contacted regarding the new policy and though Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is far less interested in accepting refugees than his German counterpart, the fact that Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Obran has not ruled out striking a deal with Germany and Austria suggests that Berlin can mitigate the immigrant crisis by paying off Vienna and Budapest. We’ll have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s vast tolerance for immigrants will be put to the test in elections this September, as parties who oppose Sweden’s current policies are looking to make gains in a country that sees itself as “a humanitarian superpower” yet prides itself on social cohesion.
– JVW