Merkel agrees to migrant crackdown in bid to save coalition
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel, who staked her legacy on welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed on Monday to build camps for those seeking asylum and to tighten the border with Austria to save her government.
It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who was once seen as the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but who has come under intense pressure at home over her migration policy.
Merkel will limp on as chancellor as a result of her move, an agreement with conservatives in her coalition government. For how long is unclear as populism and nationalism are taking root — fast — in the mainstream of German politics.
“Her political capital is depleted,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund and a former presidential speechwriter. “We are well into the final chapter of the Merkel era.”
“Under her continued leadership, Germany will be largely immobilized at home and in Europe,” Kleine-Brockhoff added, a dramatic change for a country that has been Europe’s political and economic anchor. “But the promise of Merkel was stability, not immobility.”
The move came after a clash over migration between Merkel and her own interior minister, Horst Seehofer, that almost toppled the coalition government she leads.
The first woman and the first easterner to run a reunified Germany, Merkel has been celebrated as a standard-bearer of liberalism for more than a decade.
But since she welcomed more than 1 million migrants to Germany in 2015 and 2016, nationalism and populism have made a comeback in a country that has long tried to escape the shadows of its past.
Migration has become the topic that will most define her legacy, and it has become a test for German democracy itself.
The number of new migrant arrivals are down to a small fraction of what they were. Still, the anti-immigrant far right has been gaining ground, nudging the entire political spectrum rightward — most strikingly, the Bavarian conservatives led by Seehofer, who face state elections in October.
Seehofer, who was the premier of Bavaria when his state became the main gateway into Germany for migrants in 2015, said he wanted Germany to block migrants at the border if they had no papers, or if they had already registered in another European country.
Merkel, who had insisted on free movement across borders, wanted a coordinated solution with neighboring governments. A hard border would almost certainly result in other countries re-erecting checkpoints, too.
Under the Monday agreement, migrants would be checked at the border and those who have sought asylum in another European country would be turned away. Details of exactly how this would work are still unclear.
Merkel and Seehofer, who share a long and difficult history, are on two sides of a much bigger clash of values currently playing out across the Continent and ushering in a more fractured era in German politics.
In last September’s election, Merkel’s conservatives recorded their worst postwar result. It took two tries, negotiations with six other parties, nearly six months and a lot of concessions to political rivals to form a government.
In the vote, the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, emerged as the third-strongest force in the German Parliament and the main opposition party.
Its rise has helped shrink the support base of the once mighty Social Democrats and opened a rift in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, between those who stand by the chancellor’s liberal worldview and those who want her gone and yearn for a more traditional conservatism.