Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the heads of Germany’s 16 federal states met on Wednesday to address soaring migration.
The meeting ran well past schedule reaching agreement, leading to a late start to Wednesday afternoon’s meeting in Berlin, but the leaders of Germany’s 16 state governments demanded more federal funds from the national government to help accommodate refugees and asylum seekers.
The talks were expected to be tense, and a breakthrough was by no means guaranteed on Wednesday. The federal government, and in particular Finance Minister Christian Lindner, argues that Berlin already contributes generously towards the costs.
Lindner and others, like Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, have also pointed to ongoing negotiations at the EU level on new asylum procedures that are likely to be more restrictive, saying that these should also reduce the financial burden going forward.
States calling for more, and more flexible federal assistance
Nevertheless, Germany’s states are calling for the adoption of what it calls a system that can “breathe.” By this, the regional governments mean that instead of federal funds for Germany’s states being agreed for fixed periods of time (generally one year), they should be flexible and should automatically increase if the number of people arriving does.
This follows higher-than-expected asylum-seeker numbers in Europe in 2022, attributable in no small part to a combination of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to the majority of COVID-related cross-border travel restrictions coming to an end.
The 16 states can often struggle to reach consensus for talks with the federal government, given that they all have their own different coalitions and governments, pitting conservative-led regions like Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia (at present at least) against notoriously left-leaning city states like Bremen and Berlin.
Hendrik Wüst, the Christian Democrat (CDU) state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and the deputy president of the group of state premiers, agreed on a position paper to put to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government — a paper that appears to anticipate this dispute going on for months.
“The federal chancellor and the heads of the state governments will meet again, by November 2023 at the latest, to debate the concrete implementation of this model,” their paper say.
The states identify four areas where they’re hoping for assistance: full compensation for the accommodation and heating costs of asylum-seekers, payments on a per capita basis that would rise with increased numbers, and federal contributions to efforts to promote integration (such as German language classes) and for care for unaccompanied minors.
Ministers point to new, likely tougher EU rules
Federal government ministers, meanwhile, are arguing that the EU is currently in the process of clamping down on refugees more rigorously at the bloc’s external border.
These new rules are still under deliberation at the EU level and are not yet ripe to return to the German legislature for approval, but several European politicians have hinted at some of the likely changes being considered.
German Finance Minister Lindner was one of them, speaking on German television on Tuesday evening ahead of the meeting.
“I believe that, in order to get back in control, the physical protection of the [EU’s] external border should also be brought into consideration,” Lindner said on the RTL/ntv partner broadcasters. When pressed on what exactly he meant by physical protection, he used the German word that probably best translates as a “fence.”
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, a Social Democrat, had made similar comments in the newspapers over the weekend. She told Bild am Sonntag that the EU should do more to try to ensure that only people with a realistic chance of being granted asylum cross its external borders.
“In future, decisions on asylum for people with barely any chance of securing protection inside the EU must be taken at the [bloc’s] external borders,” Faeser said. People without realistic chances, for instance if they come from a country EU members deem to be generally safe and cannot demonstrate a personal reason for fleeing, should “return to their homes from there,” Faeser said.
