Elsewhere in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her coalition partners ended a meeting on Sunday without a breakthrough to resolve differences over how to handle the flood of refugees pouring into Germany.
“That’s Horst Seehofer’s real goal and that’s what he failed to achieve, and that’s good because there’s no way to pull up a drawbridge around Germany or Europe”, Gabriel told reporters Monday in Berlin.
The state premier of Bavaria and chairman of Christian Social Union (CSU), a sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had threatened to take “appropriate measures” if his demands were not met.
“We must take action today, so that we would not have to close the borders”, the newspaper wrote, citing Merkel’s words during the summit. In the last two months, 344,000 refugees entered Bavaria, according to the state’s interior ministry.
“If there is no agreement, then there is no agreement”, Gabriel said, adding that the government would do better to focus on other tasks such as speeding up asylum procedures and improving the integration of refugees.
Merkel has sought to sidestep the domestic squabbling, focusing on the geopolitical dimension of the region’s refugee crisis, which has been compounded by the civil war in Syria and exposed the 28-member European Union’s inability to settle on a strategy for responding to it.
Seehofer has been one of the most vociferous critics of Merkel’s generous policy towards the refugees and he has been demanding her to put a limit on their number Germany would take.
As well as agreeing on the swift introduction of transit zones, the conservative allies floated plans to restrict the right of a few migrants to have their families follow them to Germany, and called for joint German-Austrian police patrols along the border with Austria. Those arriving from “safe” countries, such as Kosovo or Albania, would be subject to an accelerated asylum process to send them home.
Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said the talks would resume Thursday.
But the proposal has sparked a row in the coalition with the left-leaning Social Democrats, who say such centers would be akin to erecting a group of prisons on Germany’s eastern border that would be impossible to maintain and would likely be challenged in the courts. He would prefer to see asylum requests being directly checked at the border before refugees are even allowed into the country. A record 218,394 refugees fled across the Mediterranean Sea in October, more than in all of a year ago, the United Nations refugee agency said.
As the chancellor seeks to defuse the political unrest over her open-door refugee policy, she also confronts waning public approval. Backing for her CDU-led bloc slipped two percentage points to 36 percent last week, down from an August peak of 43 percent, according to a weekly poll carried out by Forsa.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has been meeting with officials on a plan to weed out applicants, but no conclusions have been reached, a spokesman said.
“Support for Merkel is dropping”, Dr Andrea Roemmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, said in an interview. “What she can not lose is public support”.
