German coalition agrees watered-down migrant deal

Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) have backed a watered-down plan to reduce asylum seeker numbers without undermining the EU’s Schengen free travel area.

The compromise does away with the migration plan’s most controversial measure – closed, ex-territorial “transit centres” – and instead proposes expedited asylum checks during detention at a federal police station, lasting a maximum of 48 hours.

In exchange the SPD has secured agreement on a long-standing political demand: a new law to attract and regulate qualified workers from abroad. SPD leaders said they hoped the agreement marked the end of the “summer theatre” that nearly shattered the political alliance between chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its CSU Bavarian ally.

CSU leader Horst Seehofer, who is also federal interior minister, said the compromise was “A to Z what one as responsible minister could wish for”.

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He had threatened to resign without new powers to refuse entry to migrants seeking asylum in Germany who had already filed an application elsewhere in the EU. The plan will send them back to that country – or Austria – but only on the basis of bilateral agreements with the countries concerned.

The new plan will affect an estimated 150 arrivals monthly in Bavaria, according to current figures. Even so, Mr Seehofer insisted the bad-tempered row with his political allies had been worth it. “This is about implementing the law on the border, not the number of cases,” he said.

Hours after the chancellor gave him the responsibility of striking bilateral deals on which the deal hinges, Mr Seehofer appeared anxious to knock the ball back to Dr Merkel.

"I assume that, given the complexity and European dimension ... the most important points, in the end, will have to be nailed down by the leaders," he said. In Saturday's Der Spiegel magazine, he warns that failure to reach bilateral deals could yet lead to unilateral expulsions.

Such remarks are unlikely to simplify Mr Seehofer’s task of winning over Vienna’s conservative-far right coalition. So far it has refused to take back migrants registered elsewhere, as has Hungary’s anti-migrant prime minister, Viktor Orban. And though Greece is open to such an arrangement, Italy – another major arrival point for migrants – has so far refused to talk.

Human rights ‘erosion’

German refugee support group Pro Asyl was scathing of the compromise deal it said “erodes” European respect for human rights and allows “Europe’s richest industrial nation impose responsibility for observance of refugees’ human rights to poorer [Schengen] border states, in particular Greece”.

As millions of German holidaymakers drive south this weekend, through the Brenner Pass motorway to Italy, Austria has announced plans for five days of border checks from Monday.

Vienna insists the July checks, to be repeated in September, have nothing to do with the German plans but insists that – like Rome – it is ready to impose border controls if need be.

With migration-related temporary border controls already in place around the Schengen area, business leaders around Europe have expressed alarm at the economic cost of further checks.

A 2016 study by Munich’s Ifo institute found that Schengen had boosted inter-EU trade by 3 per cent and that “peripheral countries benefit more than central ones”.

With Germany’s migrant row in abeyance rather than resolved, Berlin political analysts believe Angela Merkel will intervene to prevent her interior minister imposing unilateral border policies that undermine the Schengen area.

For Almut Möller, of Berlin’s European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), preserving Schengen is a matter of German self-interest, given its central location and economic model.

“Germany is a world champion exporter,” she said, “but that would no longer fly if borders went up again across continental Europe.”