Merkel given 2-week deadline to solve Germany’s migrant problem

ANGELA Merkel was yesterday given a twoweek ultimatum to reach an EU immigration deal and avoid a rebellion in her coalition government.

The German leader’s Bavarian sister party – the CSU – had warned it will press ahead with plans to close the borders if no solution was found to cutting immigration.

Now the CSU says it will allow her to try to seek deals with other EU countries instead. However, party leader Horst Seehofer insisted on a hard-line ‘immigration masterplan’ if she fails.

‘We wish the Chancellor success in this,’ he said. ‘But we stand by our position that, if this does not succeed, turning people back immediately at the border must be possible.’

Under Mr Seehofer’s proposals, officials would be handed the power to turn away migrants who have registered for asylum elsewhere in Europe or do not hold valid identity papers.

His plans were rejected by Mrs Merkel last week. She fears that unilateral action by Berlin could stir tensions with neighbouring countries. But speaking in Munich after emergency talks over the weekend, Mr Seehofer said the Chancellor now agreed to ‘ 2and-a-half’ of the 3 proposals included in his reform package.

In a thinly veiled criticism of Mrs Merkel’s open-door immigration policy, he said his Bavarian party was not behind ‘many decisions that divided Europe’.

Mrs Merkel insisted there would be ‘no automatism’ regarding rejections at the border, even if she did not find a deal with other EU leaders before a summit this month.

Dampening CSU claims that it could eventually push ahead with its proposals regardless, Mrs Merkel insisted she was ultimately in charge of government policies.

She did, however, promise that those asylum seekers who have already been rejected would not be allowed to re-enter Germany.

FOR the SIXTEENTH time yesterday the Lords rejected a key piece of Government Brexit legislation, flouting yet again the most fundamental principle of the British constitution – that the Commons should always have primacy over the unelected, unaccountable upper House.

Yet instead of fighting this brazen assault on our Parliamentary system, rebel Tory MPs and diehard Labour Remainers are actively conspiring in the peers’ bid to wreck the Brexit process. So obsessed are they with overturning the referendum result, that they will plumb any depths of hypocrisy and opportunism to achieve their goal.

But what they haven’t noticed is that while they posture and strut across the Westminster stage, the very foundations of their beloved EU are crumbling. Across the continent the people have had enough of being dictated to by a remote, undemocratic Brussels bureaucracy and – just like the British – are crying out for change.

The trigger of course, is unfettered immigration, a subject the political elite has tried desperately to sweep under the carpet but which has now burst into the open, with dramatic results.

In Germany, Chancellor Merkel’s disastrous decision to open her country’s borders to a million migrants from Africa and the Middle East has created a storm of popular protest which threatens her very survival.

Her coalition partners in the Christian Social Union are now demanding a ban on asylum seekers who are registered in other EU countries.

This could mark the beginning of the end of free movement – and, if she stands in the way, the end of Mrs Merkel’s career.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Austria, Greece and now Italy – which last week closed its ports to a boatload of refugees – anti-immigration parties are on the march. And they are all demanding the right to impose tougher border controls.

Even Nick Clegg, the most slavish Europhile of them all, seems to be accepting the inevitable, saying yesterday that freedom of movement is no longer ‘an untouchable principle’. (This is the same Mr Clegg who four years ago described it as ‘a cornerstone of European integration’.)

So does he also now believe in ‘taking back control’?

Immigration is not the only problem. The single currency has beggared many of the southern EU nations, with Italy, Spain and Greece laden with debt and marooned in economic stagnation. Any political system that allows youth unemployment to rise above 40 per cent and offers the young no hope for the future is surely doomed.

So Michel Barnier and his team can swagger and boast all they like about EU unity. The reality is that the European project is fracturing. The sooner Britain gets out and starts looking to the wider world, the better.