Germany’s coalition government will play its part in ensuring the success of cross-party talks on curbing migration, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Saturday amid an increasingly heated atmosphere in the country over the issue.
“It won’t be our fault if they don’t work out. I hope that they do work out, because it would be good for society and peace,” he told meeting in his Teltow constituency in the eastern state of Brandenburg near Berlin.
The three coalition parties and the conservative opposition are to meet along with the leaders of the country’s 16 federal states on Tuesday to hammer out a joint position.
The cross-party initiative was called following a mass stabbing by a 26-year-old Syrian man at a festival in the western German city of Solingen on August 23. Three people died and eight others were injured.
Ahead of the talks, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU/CSU opposition bloc, said that he was prepared to continue the talks only if undocumented migrants are immediately turned back at Germany’s borders.
Earlier President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for willingness to compromise from all involved in the cross-party talks.
Steinmeier, whose role is largely ceremonial, said in Berlin that he was following the consultations between the centre-left government and the conservative opposition in the expectation of a common understanding between them.
“I’m convinced that it is up to the parties of the democratic centre to work out solutions to questions that are causing concern to many people,” Steinmeier said, adding that a general effort across party lines was needed.
Steinmeier earlier pledged that Germany as a whole would strive to find a solution to the problem of irregular migration.
“We have to undertake every, really every, effort to implement the rules on limiting access already in place and those that we are now creating in addition,” he said.
Two state elections held in the immediate aftermath of the Solingen attack saw strong performances from anti-migration parties on both the right and the left.
Package of measures to be debated next week
Scholz’s three-party coalition has agreed on the details of a package of measures aimed at strengthening security in the wake of the attack, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said on Saturday.
A draft bill has been submitted to the coalition’s parliamentary groups for consideration, he said, adding that it could discussed in the full legislature as soon as next week.
The broad outline of the proposal was unveiled late last month and includes stricter rules on carrying knives in public, faster deportations, tight new limits on benefits for asylum seekers, and greater police powers to address suspected Islamist threats.
“It is now in the hands of parliament to get all of this moving quickly,” Buschmann said.
But the measures may not go far enough for the opposition bloc, which has demanded tough limits on the number of asylum seekers entering country.
