Germany: Merkel, CSU to make last bid to save coalition

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and its coalition partner CSU will meet in Berlin on Monday evening in a last ditch effort to save the coalition government, party officials have said.

CSU leader and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who advocated an anti-immigrant agenda, had threatened to quit from the government on Sunday night, but later announced a three-day deadline for a compromise with the CDU.

Seehofer’s insistence on a controversial “migration master plan" has threatened the future of CSU’s decades-long partnership with the CDU, and the future of Merkel-led coalition government.

The plan foresees turning away asylum seekers at Germany’s border if they entered the EU from another member state and first registered there. Or if they had already applied for asylum and been rejected.

Merkel has so far opposed Seehofer’s plan and argued that unilateral moves would have “a domino effect”, prompting other EU member states to push back refugees and undermine her efforts for an EU-wide asylum policy.

The chancellor managed to clinch an agreement at the EU leaders’ summit last week, which envisaged setting up “migrant camps” inside and outside the EU, where asylum seekers would be forced to stay when their applications are examined by authorities.

According to the agreement, EU member states would take in refugees from these camps on a voluntary basis.

Seehofer criticized the outcome of the EU summit and argued that these measures would be “ineffective” in stemming the flow of migrants entering the country using illegal routes.

The CSU, which faces a regional election in Bavaria in October, has recently sharpened its criticism of Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees, and argued that Germany should not wait for other EU member states, and move forward with unilateral measures to stop irregular migration.

Germany received more than a million refugees in the last thee years, mostly from Syria and Iraq.

Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open doors for refugees fleeing conflicts and persecution was widely criticized by conservatives, and was exploited by the far-right and populist parties.

Her CDU and its sister party CSU have suffered heavy losses in the country's federal elections last year, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored record gains and entered the parliament for the first time.

Currently Merkel’s CDU, its sister party CSU and their coalition partner Social Democratic Party (SPD) control 399 of the 709 seats in the German parliament. The CDU’s 200 lawmakers and CSU’s 46 lawmakers have a joint parliamentary group.