Germany: Migration Deal Keeps Merkel in Power, for Now

Excerpt:

In an extraordinary last-minute reversal, Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing the imminent collapse of her coalition government, agreed late on July 2 to reinstate border controls with Austria.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer had threatened to resign from Merkel’s cabinet unless she agreed to a plan by July 3 to reduce so-called irregular secondary movements. The plan to which Merkel agreed entails holding refugees at detention camps to be established along Germany’s southern border, the main gateway for refugees to the country, and turning back those who have already claimed asylum in other EU countries.

Seehofer’s resignation would have called into question the continued viability of a 70-year-alliance between Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and his Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble warned that the two parties were “standing at the edge of the abyss.”

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Soeren Kern

Soeren Kern is a Spain-based analyst of European politics and transatlantic defense and security-related issues, particularly the rise of Islam in the West. He is a regular commentator about European affairs for newspapers and radio programs on both sides of the Atlantic. Kern, who has worked for think tanks in Madrid, New York City and Washington, D.C., served in the U.S. Air Force (stationed in Germany) during the last decade of the Cold War. He has visited more than one hundred countries, including most of those in Europe and the Middle East. A dual citizen of the United States and Germany, Kern graduated with a degree in diplomacy and international security from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and also studied Middle Eastern history and geopolitics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.