German government on the brink over immigration policy – is this the end for Merkel?
Posted by admin978 on July 2, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Angela Merkel (left) is at odds with her own interior minister Horst Seehofer (right) over immigration policy in a row that could transform European politics.
Germany’s coalition government is on the verge of collapse due to serious splits over immigration policy.
Chancellor Angela Merkel took the disastrous decision in 2015 to admit more than a million refugees in what amounted to an ‘open border’ policy. Now her own interior minister (equivalent to a British Home Secretary) is threatening to resign.
This is especially serious because the minister concerned (Horst Seehofer) leads the Bavarian conservative party CSU, which has been allied to Merkel’s CDU for the entire history of the German Federal Republic: all the way back to 1945.
Seehofer’s immediate concern is so-called “secondary migration”, by which immigrants to one EU country then move to another EU country. Understandably he wants Germany to have control of its own borders.
Merkel tried last week to reach a deal with other EU leaders which would satisfy her anti-immigration critics, both among her own government allies and in the general population, but she seems to have failed.
If Seehofer’s CSU splits from the CDU, it will be the most serious change in Western European politics since the Second World War – a much bigger deal than Brexit – and might give a tremendous boost to plans for a continent-wide alliance of anti-immigration parties, now being promoted by Italy’s deputy prime minister and interior minister Matteo Salvini.
(July 3rd update: Seehofer and Merkel seemed to have patched up a deal to avoid an immediate split in the government, but the big issues remain unresolved and the latest deal is causing a fresh immigration row with Austria.)
Meanwhile demonstrations have been held for the last two weekends in the cities of Hamm and Nuremberg against the imprisonment of 89-year-old Ursula Haverbeck for the opinion crime of ‘Holocaust denial’. Mrs Haverbeck dared to question the establishment’s line on 1940s history – the very same historical myths that underpinned the postwar political consensus which is now collapsing.
The most recent protest march last Saturday (see below) was attended by veteran British nationalist and campaigner for historical truth Richard Edmonds, whose speech begins at 25:28 in the first video below.
This week the latest Orwellian trial will take place in Germany, featuring Canadian-German Alfred Schaefer and his sister, violinist Monika Schaefer, a Canadian citizen who has been imprisoned since January awaiting trial for the ‘crime’ of uploading a ‘Holocaust denial’ video to YouTube.
