German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Bavarian allies gave her a two-week reprieve today to set tougher border controls in the EU, saying if she didn’t meet the deadline they would start automatically rejecting asylum seekers at the German border.
The news came as that populist Italian Minister of the Interior pledged to start expelling Roma gypsies.
Following days of tense talks in Munich over Interior Minister’s Horst Seehofer’s “migration masterplan,” the Chancellor was given until an EU summit in late June to find a solution, also granting her her time to speak with other countries affected by the move such as Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.
Mr Seehofer, leader of the CSU, which formed a coalition with Mrs Merkel’s CDU party, said he wants to shut the borders to all asylum seekers who have already been registered in other EU countries en route to Germany.
"In addition to the functioning of a constitutional state, it is also about the credibility of my party,” he said on Monday. “The CSU is in favor of a European solution, but if this is not possible, there must be rejections at the German border.”
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If the EU negotiations were to fail, Mr Seehofer said he would go ahead with turning away asylum seekers at the German border as early as the first week of July. His desire to do so puts him in “fundamental dissent” with Mrs Merkel, he added.
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Mr Seehofer has said he wants to ensure that any asylum seeker with a barriers to entering Germany are not permitted in if they don’t fulfil the requirements of Article 6 of the Schengen Borders Code. They include, among other things, the requirement of holding a valid travel document and visa.
For 70 years, Merkel’s CDU has formed a close alliance with the CSU, but the 2015 refugee crisis in 2015 triggered tensions between the two sister parties.
At a press conference in Berlin today, Mrs Merkel said that the CDU and CSU have the common goal of reducing the influx of refugees.
Breaking up the longstanding alliance between the parties would cost Mrs Merkel her majority in the Bundestag.
Some hardliners within the CDU have also called on Merkel to drastically take measures to reduce immigration to Germany, seeking to win back disenchanted voters which the party has lost to the far-Right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Peter Kneffel/dpa via AP
Matteo Salvini, Italy’s populist Interior Minister on Monday, called for a census to be carried out of Roma gypsies in Italy, saying that he would expel any who did not have the legal right to be in the country.
As part of its election campaign, his party, The League pledged to shut down and bulldoze illegal Roma camps, many of them found on the outskirts of Italian towns and cities.
Many Roma people are Italian citizens who have been in the country for generations, while others come from Eastern Europe.
Mr Salvini said ideally he would like to get rid of all of them.
"Unfortunately, you have to keep the Italian Roma at home," he said.
Civil rights groups said the idea of a nationwide sweep of Roma people was against the law.
"The interior minister does not seem to know that a census on the basis of ethnicity is not permitted under the law," said Carlo Stasolla, the head of Associazione July 21, which defends the rights of Roma people.
He said most Roma gypsies had the right to live in Italy and the few that did not were "effectively stateless, and therefore cannot be expelled."
Maurizio Martina, the head of the centre-Left Democratic Party, said the idea of a census was "abhorrent".
Mr Salvini was fueling "a spiral of propaganda that is very dangerous," he said.