Upon arriving at the informal meeting of EU27 interior ministers in Warsaw on Thursday, 30 January (see other news), German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser criticised the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for adopting, the day before, a parliamentary motion on immigration with the support of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD)—breaking the “cordon sanitaire” around the far right.
The resolution is a response to last week’s fatal attack, which was perpetrated by an Afghan national who had arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker. Among other things, the CDU motion suggests making the controls at Germany’s borders permanent and refusing all asylum seekers entry at the border.
On “behalf of the federal government, I can say that we will not jeopardise this joint European action with dangerous national initiatives”, the German minister stated in response. “We will continue to act in a European way, based on Basic Law and European law”, she affirmed. “I want to make this clear because the debates that are taking place in Germany these days are naturally irritating our European neighbours”.
Regarding plans to ‘push back’ asylum seekers at the country’s borders, she also pointed out that the current government had already carried out 40,000 deportations since October 2023 and that the border controls on which the ‘Scholz’ government had already decided would be maintained “until our external borders are better protected”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)