BERLIN: Two days after pulling her government back from the brink by agreeing to set up transit camps for migrants at the border — and to eventually turn some migrants away — Chancellor Angela Merkel is working to keep the deal from falling apart.
She and her interior minister have critical meetings Thursday with the leaders of Austria and Hungary, who must agree to take back some of the migrants and refugees in order to make the deal Merkel struck with the rebellious Bavarian partners in her own government.
Those leaders already criticised Merkel for her welcoming stance in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere flooded into Europe. So it is unclear if Austria and Hungary will go along with taking in migrants and refugees that Germany turns away.
Those decisions will be important in keeping her three-party coalition intact. Although the conservatives in her coalition have signed onto the deal, the other partner, the centre-left Social Democratic Party, has expressed reservations about setting up “transit camps,” especially if other countries will not take the migrants and refugees back and they are left in limbo.
The stakes of Thursday’s negotiations are high, not only for Merkel — who sought in a television interview to reassure Germans that her government had returned to stability — but for Europe itself. She has fought for democratic principles and the ideal of open borders in the face of a sharp swing to the right among many of the European Union’s 28 member states.
“Europe needs Germany to have a stable government — now more than ever,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel. “Ms. Merkel is not perfect, but she is measured, calm and rational. Germany and Europe would be worse off without her.”
Under EU rules, migrants and refugees are supposed to apply for asylum in the first member country in which they arrive, rather than pressing on to other nations like Germany. But Merkel’s government stopped enforcing those rules when other European countries balked at handling the migrants and refugees in their countries.
Merkel agreed on Monday to set up the transit centers after a two-week standoff with her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, who is head of the Christian Social Union, the conservative party in Bavaria that is the third party in her governing coalition.
The centers would be set up at certain crossing points along Germany’s border with Austria, where migrants and refugees arriving from the south would be screened to determine whether they had already applied for asylum in another EU country.
If so, they would be returned to that country. If that country declined to take them back, the deal states that “on the basis of an agreement with Austria,” they would be sent back there.
But Austrian leaders and members of the Social Democrats say that such an agreement does not exist.
Seehofer was heading to Vienna on Thursday to discuss the transit center deal with the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz.
In Berlin, Merkel is to hold talks with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, whose country was the first point of entry into the EU for many of the migrants and refugees who later made their way to Germany, and whom Berlin would like to now send back.
Seehofer’s party has cultivated close ties with the Hungarian leader, even as Merkel has been critical of Orban’s rejection of taking in migrants and refugees.
In addition to demanding more clarity on the details of the deal, the Social Democrats are insisting that any camps not become “massive” internment camps, where people would be held indefinitely. Despite those concerns, the party appeared likely to remain in the coalition, analysts said, because it stands to lose support if the government falls and new elections are held.
In what appeared to be an effort to assuage concerns among her coalition partners, Merkel said in an interview with the German public broadcaster ARD that authorities would have to decide on the fate of those passing through the centers within 48 hours.
The number of people seeking asylum in Germany has dropped significantly after peaking at more than 1 million in 2015. But a string of attacks on young women by migrants and refugees, a terrorist attack by a migrant on a Christmas market, and fears that the country’s social welfare system is being abused have caused many Germans to turn against the openness, led by Merkel, shown by Germany three years ago.
The German federal police said that in the first five months of this year, their officers stopped 4,600 people they classified as “unauthorised arrivals” — those who would now be sent to the centers. They say they turned back more than half of those people, but did not explain what happened to the others.
Merkel has been edging to the right on migrant issues over the past year as her centre-right party has bled supporters to the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. That same party now threatens Seehofer’s grip on power in Bavaria before a state election in October.
But the deal Merkel struck Monday makes clear that she has shifted further from the values she has long espoused on Germany’s — and Europe’s — being strong enough to take in those in need.
Despite the bitterness of the dispute over migrants and refugees, the chancellor insisted that her fractious coalition, and she herself, would survive for a full, four-year term.
“I can’t promise that there won’t be disputes again about other issues, as this is usual when a government includes three parties,” the chancellor said in the television interview.
“This time it was a ferocious dispute about a very emotional topic,” she said. “But I firmly expect, and I’ll do my part to ensure, that our government does good work, not only now but in the coming years.”
— New York Times News Service
