Angela Merkel was facing a possible government crisis on Tuesday as a deep rift opened with one of her coalition partners over migrant policy.
The German chancellor was locked in a stand-off with her interior minister over plans to turn away asylum-seekers at the German border.
Horst Seehofer abruptly called off a press conference scheduled to announce his new asylum policy as it emerged Mrs Merkel had blocked the plans.
But the interior minister was refusing to back down over the issue, leading to fears of a power struggle within the government.
Any move to sack Mr Seehofer by Mrs Merkel could lead to the collapse of her coalition. The interior minister is leader of her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and could pull it out of the government, leaving Mrs Merkel without a majority in parliament.
Percentage of people comfortable with having social relations with immigrants
While it is thought unlikely the clash would come to that, Mrs Merkel was facing a serious challenge to her authority which could limit her ability to negotiate with European Union partners.
At the centre of the dispute are Mr Seehofer’s plans to turn away asylum-seekers who are already registered in another European Union country at the German border.
Under the EU’s rules Germany can already send asylum-seekers back to the first member state they entered. But cases are only decided once migrants have applied for asylum and few are actually deported: last year only 7,100 out of 64,000 such cases resulted in deportation,
Mr Seehofer wants to change that by turning away such migrants at the border. But Mrs Merkel is said to fear such a move could anger other EU countries and wreck her efforts to negotiate a new EU-wide migrant policy.
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“As far as I am concerned, we will apply European law. Because I only see a solution in European regulation,” she told German television at the weekend.
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Mrs Merkel is said to be particularly concerned Mr Seehofer’s proposals will upset the new populist government in Italy, which says it is being made to shoulder too much of the burder as one of the main points of entry for migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
But Mrs Merkel’s critics say she is more concerned at the damage to her image if she is seen to close the border now after refusing to do so during the migrant influx of 2015.
The dispute has reopened the rift between the chancellor and Mr Seehofer, who was the biggest critic of her “open-door” refugee policy in 2015.
The two buried the hatchet to put on a united front for last year’s election, and Mr Seehofer was rewarded with control of migrant policy as interior minister. He was set to announce the new measures as part of an asylum “masterplan” on Tuesday.
But he is said to be in no mood to water down a key proposals, and reportedly told MPs at a party meeting on Monday he was not prepared to release “half a plan with lazy compromises”.
“Seehofer’s masterplan is becoming a disaster plan,” Burkhard Lischka, parliamentary spokesman for Mrs Merkel’s other coalition partner, the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD) said.
Leading CSU members made it clear the party is united behind Mr Seehofer. The party faces regional elections in Bavaria this October and is determeined to fend off a challenge from the nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has campaigned against government migrant policy.