Controversial EU migrants deal cracks Olaf Scholz’s coalition

New splits have emerged in Olaf Scholz’s coalition after the German government backed a controversial EU deal on migration and asylum.

On Thursday, EU interior ministers made a long-awaited breakthrough on the divisive issue at a meeting in Luxembourg after giving last-minute concessions to Italy.

However, those concessions, which speed up asylum procedures at borders, were met with dismay by the Left wing of Mr Scholz’s SPD party and the Greens, his coalition partners.

More than 700 party members wrote to the Greens’ co-leaders – as well as Annalena Baerbock, the country’s foreign minister – and called on them to veto the EU deal.

Instead, the three-party coalition government backed an agreement, which allows asylum seekers to be deported from Europe’s borders if their application fails, in a process that should last a maximum of 12 weeks.

It also allows EU governments to refuse to accept migrants, relocated from member states bearing the brunt of arrivals, if they pay €20,000 (£17,000) for each person they refuse to host.

“If we as the Federal Government had been able to pass the reform on our own, it would have looked different,” said Ms Baerbock, in the face of anger from 24 Bundestag members from the SPD and Greens.

She said that the new border procedures were the “bitter part” of the compromise, but added that member states would never have agreed to accept relocated migrants if they had not been accepted.

“Anyone who thinks this compromise is unacceptable is accepting that… families and children from Syria or Afghanistan who have fled war, torture and the most serious human rights violations will be stuck at the external border forever.

“A no or abstention by Germany on the reform would have meant more suffering, not less.”

Ms Baerbock added that blocking the deal would have meant “a common European asylum policy based on solidarity would be dead for years”.

Berlin did secure an exemption for minors from the rapid asylum procedures but not for families, as it had wished.

Ricarda Lang, the co-leader of the Greens, said: “Germany should not have agreed.”

Hakan Demir, the SPD’s deputy spokesman on migration, told the EurActiv website: “It is apparent that this creates the risk of larger camps at the borders, which have difficult human rights standards. I am against an agreement at any price at the expense of human rights.”

Mr Scholz’s coalition, which is looking to break with Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, has been repeatedly hit with accusations of infighting.

However, the FDP, the third member of the coalition, praised the deal and said it would relieve the “burden” on German towns and cities.

Ministers also agreed to give national governments the right to decide on defining safe countries where failed asylum seekers can be returned, rather than agreeing common EU rules on the definition.

The Luxembourg deal has raised hopes that the EU will finally be able to agree to an overhaul of its asylum rules after efforts to revamp them broke down in 2015 during the migrant crisis.

The issue has long divided countries such as Italy and Greece, who suspect northern member states of leaving them to deal with migrant arrivals, and countries who think the southern states simply wave them through to elsewhere in the EU.

Negotiations were further complicated by anti-migrant governments in Poland and Hungary refusing to take in any refugees under a mandatory relocation quota set up by Brussels after the crisis.