Earlier talks on Sunday failed to produce a compromise, and tensions escalated within Merkel’s coalition, for whom the refugee crisis presents the biggest challenge in her 10-year rule.
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On the front line of arrivals from Austria, Bavaria had demanded “transit zones”: ex-territorial camps in border regions to detain new arrivals, with expedited deportations of those with no right to asylum.
A nascent deal reached this week indicates Ms Merkel is reasserting her control over the domestic political drift Germany has witnessed recently amid coalition sniping that put her chancellorship in question.
Merkel’s later meeting with the premiers was to center on more federal refugee funding for the states from Berlin.
SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel said he was pleased the coalition had managed to agree on a concept which did not involve setting up ex-territorial centers or zones which evoked a sense of “detention”. Most were from Syria – with 88,640 Syrian refugees on the ministry’s records – followed by Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo.
The agreement between the ruling CDU/CSU alliance and junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, came as the European Commission said it expected the number of people fleeing war and poverty to Europe to reach three million by 2017.
It was revealed Thursday that the European Union has relocated only 116 migrants more than a month after the start of a plan to distribute 160,000 asylum-seekers throughout the continent.
As Germany draws closer to the million-migrant mark, efforts will be invested in speeding up the repatriations of rejected asylum seekers, it was revealed on 5 November. “We want to show that Germany is an open country that we are proud of and which has a good reputation in the world”.
Aides said Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), might grapple with the issues late into the night with the other two party leaders.
But the new policy was condemned by opposition parties.
The United Nations and experts say governments’ emissions-cutting pledges ahead of a global conference in Paris beginning this month aren’t yet enough to hit the target of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century compared with pre-industrial times.
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But he told parliament that the country had the funds necessary to meet the challenge.
