Migrants in Hungary. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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Migration continues to challenge the internal political stability of European countries – and the solidarity of the EU itself. It is doing so even though it is sharply down on its 2015 peak: there were 37,000 migrants who reached Greece, Italy and Spain by sea so far in 2018. The numbers for Italy alone are 77% down.
The domestic political effects, though, are becoming ever sharper – as we are seeing in Italy, Austria and elsewhere. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and the main architect of the crisis, is the latest leader to find herself in the firing line.
Since numbers are down, and there has been no surge, this is mainly because of a ‘re-traumatisation’ of public opinion following corruption scandals involving Iraqi Yazidis and the refugee agency, and another shocking story of how an Iraqi asylum-seeker was able to flee Germany (with his entire family) after raping and murdering a 14 year-old German girl.
The two allied German conservative parties – Merkel’s Christian Democractic Union (CDU) , which is bi-confessional and national, and the more right-wing cover version, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which stands in Bavaria alone – are taking different directions over the issue. The CSU’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, wants to capitalise on public opinion and take a stand on immigration anticipating the regional elections on 14th October. He fears that the far right party, Alternativ für Deutschland, could well deny the CSU its governing majority; his anxiety is intensified by the AfD’s all-time high of 16% in the latest polls.
Many in Merkel’s CDU agree with Seehofer, angry that the chancellor has tacked to the Left in her painstakingly built but lackluster coalition with the Social Democrats. And some suspect a right-wing ‘putsch’ against her by the CSU’s chairman Alexander Dobrindt and Markus Söder1 – Seehofer’s successor as Bavarian Minister President – who would like to see Jens Spahn succeed Merkel as CDU leader, rather than the softer option of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Seehofer, meanwhile, has alighted on what is called ‘secondary movement’ to make his anti-migrant stand2 – even though the main migration problem is the porosity of Europe’s southern maritime frontiers with Africa. In his otherwise uncontentious 63 point ‘migration masterplan’, Seehofer said he would instruct the Bavarian police to return any illegal asylum seeker to the first EU state in which they had their fingerprints taken.
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