Merkel’s magic teeters

IMMIGRATION: CONSERVATIVES IN HER COALITION QUESTION DEAL

Accord wants migrants to Germany to return to EU states that registered them. Berlin

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was fighting for her political future yesterday, looking to placate conservatives over immigration with a hard-fought European deal, even as eastern EU states called it into doubt.

Merkel’s centre-right CDU party and its conservative Bavarian CSU allies are holding separate meetings to weigh the results of last week’s EU summit, which agreed collective measures by the bloc’s 28 members to reduce immigration.

Merkel hopes the deals with Germany’s neighbours will deter Interior Minister and CSU leader Horst Seehofer from defying her by turning away at the border asylum-seekers already registered in other EU nations.

The unilateral move would force her to fire him, in turn prompting a CSU walkout that would cost her majority in parliament.

According to a document sent to coalition partners, Merkel sought to assuage the hardliners with deals with 16 other countries to return already-registered migrants if they reached Germany.

The German leader, who has been in office since 2005, has warned that the issue of migration could decide the very future of the EU itself.

The EU and bilateral deals were “only possible because the chancellor enjoys respect and authority throughout Europe,” Germany’s EU Commissioner and CDU politician Guenther Oettinger said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung weekly.

“That is very valuable for Germany, no-one should destroy it.”

But there were signs of some of the deals unravelling, as three central European nations – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – denied they had agreed to accept returned migrants.

“Given the different statements from some EU member countries, one can doubt whether all of the decisions at the EU Council will become reality,” head of the CSU parliamentary group Alexander Dobrindt told Bild am Sontag newspaper.

Leaders and MPs from the Bavarian party will meet in Munich to decide their response, while Merkel and her top lieutenants will gather in Berlin.

EU leaders agreed on Friday to consider setting up “disembarkation platforms” outside the EU, most likely in North Africa, in a bid to discourage migrants and refugees boarding EU-bound smuggler boats.

Member countries could also create processing centres to determine whether the new arrivals are returned home, as economic migrants or admitted as refugees in willing states.

At the national level, Merkel also proposes that migrants arriving in Germany who first registered in another EU country should be placed in special “ad- missions centres” under restrictive conditions, according to a document she sent to the CSU and coalition partners the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

“There will be a residency obligation reinforced with sanctions,” the document states.

It says asylum applications in Germany between January and May this year were 20% lower than the same period in 2017.

Merkel told reporters on Friday that the EU and bilateral deals were “more than equivalent in their effect” to Seehofer’s demands.

The CSU’s Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder said at a political meeting on Saturday: “Of course what has been achieved in Brussels is more than we originally thought.”

Seehofer has yet to respond in public to the Brussels summit.

But he and Merkel were spotted on Saturday discussing the outcome with tense faces on the balcony of her Berlin office. The chancellor’s frantic diplomacy was prompted by the CSU’s fear of losing its absolute majority in Bavaria’s state parliament. –