Photo: Matthias Schrader Archives Associated Press Checks with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark will be established for six months, in addition to those in place at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
Clément Kasser – AFP xs hidden-sm”>
Germany announced 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 extreme right.
“We are continuing to take a hard line against illegal immigration,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said of the new measures.
Checks with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark will be in place for six months starting September 16.
They will be in addition to controls already in place at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
Berlin considers these measures necessary for “protecting internal security against the current threats of Islamist terrorism and cross-border crime,” two weeks after the Solingen attack claimed by the Islamic State armed group.
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 says it has informed the European Union authorities, as these are exceptional measures that deviate from the rules on free movement in the Schengen area.
However, this hardening could strain relations between Germany and its neighbors, especially since the ruling coalition also said 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 “not the people who were turned away from Germany,” his Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000The 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 apply for asylum 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 their 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 obtained record results in two regional elections in early September.
The AfD won the election in Thuringia, where it is became the leading 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 in the elections.
AfD and BSW are expected to make a further electoral surge in a third election on 22 September 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, of a 26-year-old Syrian man who should have been deported.
In the wake of the attack, the government announced that it would be cutting support for asylum seekers who have entered another EU state. European before going to Germany.
Berlin also wants to speed up the expulsion 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 biggest 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 “the limited capacity of municipalities in terms of accommodation, education and integration” on Monday.