Merkel is given two weeks to seal EU deal on border controls

ANGELA MERKEL’S Bavarian allies gave her a two-week reprieve yesterday to set tougher border controls in the EU, saying that if she did not meet the deadline they would start rejecting asylum seekers at the German border.

The news came as the populist Italian interior minister pledged to start expelling Roma gipsies.

Following days of tense talks over the “migration master plan” of Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister, Mrs Merkel was given until an EU summit later this month to find a solution, also giving her time to consult other countries affected by the move such as Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

Mr Seehofer, leader of the CSU, which formed a coalition with Mrs Merkel’s CDU party, said he wanted to shut the borders to all asylum seekers who have already been registered in other EU countries en route to Germany. “In addition to the functioning of a constitutional state, it is also about the credibility of my party,” he said yesterday. “The CSU is in favour of a European solution, but if this is not possible, there must be rejections at the German border.”

If the EU negotiations were to fail, Mr Seehofer said he would go ahead with turning away asylum seekers at the German border as early as the first week of July. His desire to do so puts him in “fundamental dissent” with Mrs Merkel, he added.

For 70 years, Mrs Merkel’s CDU has formed a close alliance with the CSU, but the refugee crisis in 2015 triggered tensions between the two sister parties. Breaking up the alliance between them would cost Mrs Merkel her majority in the Bundestag.

Meanwhile, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s populist interior minister, yesterday called for a census to be carried out of Roma gipsies in Italy, saying that he would expel any who did not have the legal right to be in the country. As part of its election campaign, his party, The League, pledged to bulldoze illegal Roma camps. Many Roma people are Italian citizens who have been in the country for generations, while others come from Eastern Europe.

Mr Salvini said ideally he would like to get rid of all of them. “Unfortunately, you have to keep the Italian Roma at home,” he said.

Civil rights groups said the idea of a nationwide sweep of Roma people was against the law. “The interior minister does not seem to know that a census on the basis of ethnicity is not permitted under the law,” said Carlo Stasolla, the head of Associazione July 21, which defends the rights of Roma people. He said most Roma had the right to live in Italy and the few that did not were “effectively stateless, and therefore cannot be expelled”.

Maurizio Martina, the head of the centre-left Democratic Party, said the idea of a census was “abhorrent”.