The government said it would expand patrols as part of a ‘hard line’ on illegal migration following two deadly stabbings by rejected asylum seekers and a surge in support for the far right.
The German government announced Monday that it would expand border patrols in a bid to stop illegal crossings, after four people were killed in two attacks by rejected asylum seekers this year and anti-immigrant parties made substantial gains in two state elections.
“We are strengthening our domestic security through concrete action and we are continuing to pursue a hard line against irregular migration,” Nancy Faeser, the country’s interior minister, said in Berlin on Monday.
The move comes amid significant political pressure, not just from the far right — which got nearly a third of the votes in two state elections earlier this month — but from the mainstream conservative opposition party and a general perception that the government has lost control of the issue.
Starting next Monday, the federal police will add patrols on Germany’s normally open borders to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark for at least six months.
Southern and eastern borders — those with Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Poland — have already been patrolled since at least last year. All the countries are in Europe’s Schengen area, which normally allows for free movement across borders without stops.
The stepped-up patrols have included such things as selective traffic stops and passport checks on cross-border trains. The government has said that 30,000 people were turned away at the southern and eastern borders since border patrols there were instituted.
The announcement was another step away from former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to let more than a million refugees, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, in to claim asylum, and the willingness of the current government, led by Olaf Scholz, to take in 1.2 million Ukrainians fleeing the February 2022 Russian invasion.
It also shows the extent to which the question of migration has dominated political discussion in Germany. The country needs immigration to bolster its aging work force, but the government often finds itself on the defensive against increasingly influential extremist parties.
Some 44 percent of respondents to a poll released last week said that migration and refugees are Germany’s most pressing problem — the most for any issue. Some 77 percent of respondents to the poll, which was paid for by a public broadcaster and the Welt newspaper, said Germany needed a change in asylum policies.
Two separate stabbing attacks by rejected asylum seekers with ties to the Islamic State in two western cities this year — one of which killed a police officer in Mannheim in May, and another which killed three visitors to a public event called the “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen in August — have added fuel to the fire.
Presenting her new plan, Ms. Faeser said Monday that it served “to further limit irregular migration and to protect against the acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime.”
The announcement came a day before government coalition partners and the main opposition are to meet to discuss tightening Germany’s asylum laws. Friedrich Merz, the pugnacious leader of the opposition, threatened to skip Tuesday’s meeting unless the government committed to significant action ahead of time.
What is not yet clear is whether the police will start turning away refugees who make an asylum claim at the border.
The Syrian man who the authorities believe carried out the stabbing attack in Solingen should have been deported to Bulgaria, where he first entered the European Union. The fact that he wasn’t has led opposition politicians — including Mr. Merz — to demand that even those claiming asylum be sent back to the E.U. country where the person first set foot in the bloc.
Other politicians have called for an upper limit of 100,000 asylum claims per year, although it remains unclear how German or E.U. law — which requires every refugee claim to be heard — would allow such a limitation. Last year, Germany registered 324,636 asylum claims.
Anton Hofreiter, a European policy expert with the Green party, which has generally been the most resistant to measures directed at curbing migrant numbers, warned that such a move could make it harder for E.U. countries to work together.
“With ever more far-reaching demands, you risk the cohesion of the European Union, you risk the internal market and you risk millions of jobs,” Ms. Hofreiter told Welt TV, a broadcaster.
