Germany announced on Monday that it would introduce controls at all of its borders to combat illegal immigration, which has once again become a major political issue for Olaf Scholz’s government in the face of the rise of the far right.
“We continue to take a hard line against illegal immigration,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said of the new measures.
Controls with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark will be established for six months from September 16.
They will be added to the controls already in place at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
Berlin considers these provisions necessary for “the protection of internal security against the current threats of Islamist terrorism and cross-border crime”, two weeks after the attack in Solingen claimed by the armed group Islamic State.
Last week, an attempted attack targeted the Israeli consulate general in Munich, carried out by an 18-year-old Austrian known to have Islamist sympathies.
Where to send asylum seekers?
The Interior Ministry said it had informed the European Union authorities of the exceptional measures that deviate from the rules of free movement in the Schengen area.
This hardening could, however, strain relations between Germany and its neighbours, especially as the ruling coalition also declared on Monday that it wanted to increase the number of migrants turned back at Germany’s borders.
Austria has already warned that it “will not accept people turned back from Germany,” its Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily.
The conservative opposition (CDU) has been urging the government for several days to make wider use of the extremely controversial practice of returning asylum seekers to the European Union country through which they arrived, without allowing them to submit an asylum application in Germany.
Berlin says it has developed a legal solution “in line with European law”, which Ms Faeser is due to detail on Tuesday.
Reception capacities at the limits
Asylum and immigration policy has returned to the centre of debate in Germany with the strong rise of the far-right AfD party, which achieved record results in two regional elections in early September.
The AfD won the election in Thuringia, where it became the largest political force in the regional parliament.
A new left-wing party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which calls for tighter control of migration flows, also made a spectacular breakthrough during these elections.
AfD and BSW are expected to make further gains in a third election on September 22 in Brandenburg, the region around Berlin.
The already heated debate over asylum policy has been fuelled by the triple murder in Solingen, western Germany, in late August, allegedly committed by a 26-year-old Syrian who should have been deported.
Following the attack, the government announced that it would cut aid to asylum seekers who entered another European Union state before going to Germany.
Berlin also wants to speed up the deportation of refugees who have been convicted of crimes. At the end of August, Germany sent 28 Afghans convicted of crimes back to their country, for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.
A year ago, it had already strengthened its border controls in a context of a sharp rise in the number of asylum applications.
Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, who governs with the Greens and the Liberals, boasted on Sunday of having “achieved the greatest change in the last ten or twenty years in the management of immigration”, claiming this hardening after the reception policy embodied by the former conservative chancellor Angela Merkel.
During the 2015-2016 migration crisis, Europe’s largest economy took in more than a million refugees, including many Syrians. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Germany has taken in around a million Ukrainian exiles who fled their country.
Welcoming refugees is putting many communities to the test. Berlin cited on Monday “the limited capacities of municipalities in terms of accommodation, education and integration.”