Migrant blues dogging Merkel
● Minister defends violent protests over border issues
A tense truce within German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative camp imploded on Thursday after her hardline interior minister defended protests marred by neo-Nazi violence and blasted immigration as “the mother of all political problems”.
The latest shots across Merkel’s bow came just two months after the minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to torpedo her ruling coalition over the explosive border issue.
An uneasy calm that had taken hold during the summer holidays shattered in the aftermath of a fatal knife attack against a 35-year-old German man in the eastern city of Chemnitz in late August.
Three asylum seekers – two Iraqis and a Syrian – are suspects in the killing.
Far-right groups and thousands of local citizens took to the streets in the days after the stabbing, with a number of participants attacking people who looked foreign, and showing the illegal Nazi salute.
As Germany’s top law enforcer, Seehofer had faced calls to condemn the ugly scenes of marauding mobs that also assaulted reporters and police.
He reserved judgment until Thursday’s incendiary interview, in which he said he wished he could have joined the demonstrations.
“There is agitation and outrage among the public over this killing that I can understand,” he told the Rheinische Post.
“If I weren’t a minister, I would have hit the streets as a citizen – of course not with the radicals though.”
He insisted he had “zero tolerance for forces that seize on these developments to call for violence or to actually commit it, including against the police”.
However Seehofer, the most strident critic of Merkel’s liberal refugee policy within her coalition, expressed sympathy with the anger that fuelled the protests.
“The migration issue is the mother of all political problems in this country. I’ve been saying that for three years,” since Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than one-million asylum seekers as other EU countries shut the door on them.
The comments echoed remarks this week by Seehofer’s counterpart from Italy, firebrand minister Matteo Salvini, that Merkel had underestimated the troubles mass immigration would bring.
Merkel pushed back against the gloomy assessments and charges she had been reckless with public safety.
“I would put it differently – I would say that the migration issue poses challenges. There are problems but also successes,” she told RTL television.
“We have a completely different situation than in the autumn of 2015 [at the height of the refugee influx].
“Hence we can tell people that we have implemented measures to prevent a repetition”, including pacts with Turkey and several African countries to fight people smuggling.