“We must divide the burden on Turkey, caused by harboring more than two million refugees, between Turkey and Europe”, Merkel told reporters on Tuesday before a parliamentary group meeting with Horst Seehoferher, chairman of her coalition government’s Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union.
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On Monday, Gabriel said that few of the newest arrivals to Germany had come from the “safe” countries (referring to Balkans) and therefore the establishment of the transit zones would have a very limited impact on the total immigration numbers.
November 3, 2015 (EIRNS)-At a reportedly turbulent CDU event in Darmstadt, where Chancellor Angela Merkel met with much criticism for her refugee policy, she warned in her 30-minute keynote against building barbed wire fences and deployment of armed forces against the refugee influx along the borders, such as between Hungary and Serbia. He said the idea, favoured by Merkel’s conservatives, would only really be useful for a tiny proportion of the people arriving.
A nascent deal reached this week indicates Merkel is reasserting her control over the domestic political drift Germany has witnessed recently amid coalition sniping that put her chancellorship in question.
So far, though, they are still arguing about the vague “transit zones”. All three parties have lost support in opinion polls over their handling of the crisis. One of the main topics will be the establishment of so-called transit zones on the German-Austrian border in order to expedite the consideration of applications, and expelling those rejected.
Other countries along the migration route, however, are not interested in slowing the flow, out of fear that the migrants would remain.
He added that if Germany and Austria limit the number of migrants arriving at their borders, Slovenia would have to act because it would face “an uncontrollable number of migrants”.
Leaders of Germany’s coalition government are meeting Thursday.
Mr Gabriel confirmed last week he wanted to be his party’s candidate to run against Ms Merkel for the job of chancellor in the next federal election, due in 2017.
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And, though Merkel moved to pacify the right, she didn’t give up on her “We can cope with it” stance on Sunday, keeping her firmly on the center and left ground that the SPD might want to claim on this issue.
