He praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s work on tackling the crisis saying, “She is showing a response to this situation that many others are not doing, particularly in central and eastern Europe”.
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The German Chancellor also said the European Union will not shut its borders to refugees and allow Greece, a key point of entry into Europe, to plunge into chaos.
“What has happened is exactly what we feared, that a country is now left alone with its problems, and we can’t allow that”, Merkel said in a lengthy interview on the migrant crisis with public broadcaster ARD.
European and Turkish leaders are set to meet on March 7 to discuss the crisis, which brought more than 1 million people to Europe during 2015. Last week, Austria and several other Balkan countries introduced border restrictions, stranding many people in Greece following a migration summit in Vienna which Germany or Greece were not asked to be involved in.
In a taste of the potential unrest to come, some of the thousands of people already stranded in northern Greece tried to force their way Monday through a razor-wire border fence that neighboring Macedonia recently erected. “What’s right for Germany in the long term?”
At the same time, support for Bavarian State Premier Horst Seehofer, one of Merkel’s harshest critics in the refugee debate, plunged to 38 percent from 45 percent.
Merkel has promised a “drastic reduction” in the numbers of asylum seekers entering Germany this year after about 1 million refugees arrived in the nation last year mainly fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa.
Germany faces another issue after the government admitted it had lost around 130,000 migrants after they failed to show up at reception centres they had been sent to.
Leading German Social Democrats, part of the country’s governing coalition, earlier accused Merkel’s conservative finance minister of being too thrifty in dealing with the migrant crisis.
The criticism came after Schaeuble labelled Social Democrat proposals for wider social spending on housing and public services to complement the integration of migrants as “pitiful”.
Merkel insisted that the refugee influx be reduced through tightening European Union external borders, involving North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ships in a surveillance mission to stop refugee boats from Turkey, and an European Union deal with Ankara. Merkel said she did not support such an idea. “What’s more important? The people in the country or balancing the budget?”
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“The finance minister obviously just doesn’t get it”, Weil told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Merkel said in a TV interview, referring to the bailout of Greece following its debt crisis.
