Germany’s grand coalition is facing a bumpy run-in to next year’s federal election after a conservative shift gathered momentum at the party conference of chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
A day after Dr Merkel attracted cheers for appearing to back a ban on full Muslim veils, CDU delegates on Wednesday backed swifter deportations of failed asylum-seekers and greater use of “deportation detention facilities”.
And, in a revolt against the CDU leadership, delegates backed by a narrow, 19-vote margin a proposal demanding the rollback of a grand coalition compromise that has allowed thousands of young German-Turks hold dual citizenship.
Delegates embraced the proposals by the CDU’s revitalised conservative wing as their best election insurance against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), already polling double digit support with a strident, anti-refugee stance.
Dr Merkel’s challenge in the coming months will be to appeal to her party’s conservatives without scaring off the centrist German voters crucial to her fourth term hopes. Clearly alarmed by the dual citizenship vote, however, Dr Merkel dispatched her party secretary to warn delegates not to get carried away.
“Are we the party that gives people courage or spreads a doomsday mood?” asked Peter Tauber. “Are we the party that embraces a good future or the past? We have to answer these questions if we want to win people over.”
The dual citizenship vote concerns a policy that, until 2014, forced young Germans born to non-German parents to choose, by the age of 21, between their German and other passport. Two years ago a CDU-SPD compromise extended dual-citizenship rights enjoyed by EU and Swiss citizens to people from other countries.
In Essen, senior ministers warned against undermining the cabinet agreement – and potentially alienating an entire young generation with migrant roots.
In Berlin, SPD justice minister Heiko Maas warned: “Abolishing dual citizenship would be a huge setback for integration.”
Transit zones
The CDU dual-citizenship revolt came after delegates adopted motions praising Austria’s closure last year of the so-called Balkan refugee route, a move condemned at the time by Dr Merkel.
Following its acceptance of almost 900,000 arrivals in 2015, the number of asylum seekers to Germany has dropped to around 15,000 monthly. Anxious to avoid a repeat of last year, CDU delegates backed proposals for more asylum applications to be processed in “transit zones” outside the EU, and for refugees fished from the sea to be returned to their departure point and housed there.
Efforts to seal the EU’s external borders should be “intensified”, while people whose asylum applications are likely to fail should be housed for up to a month in “deportation facilities” to expedite their expulsion.
Opposition parties in Berlin condemned the CDU proposals as dog-whistle politics, and Dr Merkel of departing the liberal middle ground for the hard right.
Anton Hofreiter of the Green Party said: “Instead of securing refugee routes and preventing people drowning in the Mediterranean . . . Merkel has allowed herself be cornered by the AfD.”
The new tone from the CDU party conference has delighted the party’s CSU Bavarian allies, after many fruitless attempts to force a harder migration line from Dr Merkel.
Back in Essen, meanwhile, senior CDU conservatives appeared surprised by their own success and hurried to play down the likelihood of their proposals ever becoming reality.
“It’s fine that the CDU has a clear position,” said Thomas Strobl, the man behind the asylum proposals, “but there is no other democratic party with which we can implement them.”
Jens Spahn, deputy finance minister and a rising CDU conservative agreed.
“We are at the CDU party conference,” he said. “What we are talking about is what we want as a party.”
