Merkel faces refugee cap demands in coalition showdown

ANGELA MERKEL, the German chancellor, faces crucial talks on forming a new government today following last month’s damaging election losses.

Immigration is due to dominate the agenda as Mrs Merkel meets Horst Seehofer, the leader of her Bavarian sister party and an implacable opponent of her refugee policy.

Mrs Merkel is trying to put together a new coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the Green Party. Before she can begin negotiations, however, she has to put her own house in order.

Mr Seehofer is threatening to pull his Christian Social Union (CSU) party out of any coalition unless Mrs Merkel agrees to an annual limit on the number of refugees allowed into Germany.

But with both the FDP and the Greens opposed to any limit, it is a demand Mrs Merkel can ill afford to give in to. Complicating matters still further for the chancellor, she needs the CSU’s 46 MPs for a coalition to command a majority in parliament.

The CSU has been in an almost continuous alliance with Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) since 1949, and its participation in any CDU-led coalition is usually automatic.

But Mr Seehofer said last week that discussions with the CDU after the election had been “the most difficult since 1976”, when the two parties briefly split for a few months.

The CSU suffered damaging losses in last month’s elections, and Mr Seehofer’s position as party leader is hanging by a thread. He has made no secret of the fact he blames Mrs Merkel’s “open-door” refugee policy for the losses. “The election was not lost in Bavaria, but in Berlin,” he was reported to have said recently.

Mr Seehofer opposed Mrs Merkel’s refugee policy from the start and his party has long demanded an annual limit of 200,000 refugees. “We will not budge on the upper limit,” Manfred Weber, a senior MEP, said last week.

‘I advise everyone to concentrate on what lies ahead – first between the CDU and CSU’

Mrs Merkel yesterday gave her most explicit backing yet for the so-called “Jamaica” coalition – so-called because the colours of the three parties match the black, yellow and green of the Caribbean country’s flag – urging her conservative party to try to forge a three-way alliance with the FDP and the Greens for the first time.

Such an alliance would be unprecedented in Germany at the national level.

Mrs Merkel said in Dresden: “I advise everyone to concentrate on what lies ahead. First between the CDU and CSU, then with the FDP and Greens, and to understand the mandate that voters handed us.”