“Under her continued leadership, Germany will be largely immobilized at home and in Europe.”
(Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund)
To save herself (HER government) she agreed to border controls for Germany.
Details are “sketchy,” but she agreed to the creation of transit centers at Germany’s borders to detain incoming migrants.
The migrants will be sorted and those who applied for asylum elsewhere in Europe will be returned to that country. The others??? Will they be deported immediately? Or, is Germany in for many years of housing migrants in camps?
This New York Times story on what happened yesterday isn’t bad considering the source and makes the point near the end that Donald Trump is also putting pressure on Germany to pay-up for their NATO defense protection, or else. The ‘or else’ could be the removal of more of our military from the German state where we have tens of thousands of American servicemen stationed.
When President Trump goes to the NATO summit in a week, he will be meeting a very much weakened German chancellor.
Agreeing to any sort of border controls is a BFD! One of the founding principles in the creation of the European Union was the idea of free movement of people between its participating countries and Angela Merkel was a leading proponent of that policy.
From the New York Times:
Merkel, to Survive, Agrees to Border Camps for Migrants
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel, who staked her legacy on welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed on Monday to build border camps for asylum seekers and to tighten the border with Austria in a political deal to save her government.
It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who has been seen as the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but who has come under intense pressure at home from the far right and from conservatives in her governing coalition over her migration policy.
Although the move to appease the conservatives exposed her growing political weakness, Ms. Merkel will limp on as chancellor. For how long is unclear. The nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment that has challenged multilateralism elsewhere in Europe is taking root — fast — in mainstream German politics.
Ms. Merkel agreed to the latest policy after an insurrection over migration policy led by her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to bring down her coalition.
Mr. Seehofer demanded that Germany block migrants at the border if they have no papers, or have already registered in another European country.
Ms. Merkel, who supports free movement across Europe’s borders, has been opposed to any moves effectively resurrecting border controls until Monday night, when she made the deal to stay in power.
[….]
It would establish camps, called “transit centers,” at points along the border. Newly arriving migrants would be screened in the centers, and any determined to have already applied for asylum elsewhere in the European Union would be turned back.
Turning them back to the countries where they first arrived is going to cause even more tension between Germany and its neighbors. But, not mentioned here is what about all those who have no legitimate right to asylum, are they going to ship them right back to Africa or the Middle East?
Merkel in the breach—holding back the rise of the right!
Under Ms. Merkel, Germany has been a bulwark against the rise of the far right in Europe and the increasing turn against migrants. Even as neighboring countries turned away those fleeing war and strife in the Middle East, she has welcomed more than a million since 2015, and lobbied for a collective European solution.
[….]
Anti-migrant feelings helped lead to the rise of a far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has put Germany’s more mainstream parties under pressure to change.
Ms. Merkel has been unable to stem the changing tide, with cascading implications for politics in Germany and Europe.
Much more here.
President Trump should find her less cocky (than he found her in Canada at the recent G7 meeting) when he gets to the NATO summit next week in Brussels.
LOL! Maybe they can share notes on detention centers! Will German’s separate the children for instance?
Go here for my archive on the ‘Invasion of Europe.’
