German border plan to stop ‘irregular migration’ unacceptable, says Tusk

The Polish government is accusing Germany of acting unilaterally and unfairly over its “unacceptable” plans to introduce temporary controls into in the passport-free Schengen zone at all the country’s nine land borders, in what Warsaw says is a contravention of European law.

Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said Germany had introduced a “de facto suspension of the Schengen agreement on a large scale” after the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, announced Berlin’s decision to confront what she called “irregular migration” by introducing spot controls along Germany’s 2,300-mile (3,700km) frontier after a recent spate of suspected Islamist attacks.

Tusk called for “urgent consultations” with Germany’s other neighbours.

The new regulations are due to start next Monday and to be in place for an initial six months. The decision comes amid a heated political debate in Germany on migration after recent fatal attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers whose claims had been turned down, and as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), campaigning heavily against migration, this month became the first far-right political party since the Nazi era to win a state election in Germany.

Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, also expressed his objection as the row threatened to grow among EU members on Tuesday, saying Vienna was not prepared to receive any migrants who were turned back at the border with Germany. “There’s no room for manoeuvre over this,” he said.

Tusk said in televised comments on Tuesday that if Germany rejected migrants at its border with Poland, Warsaw would be forced to cope with them. “Such actions are unacceptable from the Polish point of view,” he told a meeting of ambassadors.

Poland has been tackling a migration crisis on its eastern border since 2021 that is widely believed to be choreographed by Belarus and Russia, and accuses Berlin of failing to give it adequate support. Tusk said Poland needed “full support from Germany and the entire EU when it comes to help in organising, financing, arming the eastern border, also in the context of illegal migration”.

The border control announcement was made before a second round of talks at an emergency summit about Germany’s migration policy between the coalition government, opposition parties and federal states. However, Germany’s opposition conservatives announced on Tuesday evening they were walking out, saying the talks had “collapsed” and that the government of Olaf Scholz had failed to follow through on its promise to “systematically carry out deportations” on Germany’s border.

The CDU/CSU walkout was seen as a sign that Faeser’s announcement had done little to solve the government’s domestic political woes. Alexander Dobrindt of the Bavarian CSU accused Scholz’s coalition of “being incapable of introducing effective measures to reduce irregular immigration”. He said its “complete inability to act” endangered Germany’s “order and societal cohesion” and amounted to a “capitulation”.

Faeser said after the summit that the government was urgently seeking to implement measures that were “legally secure” and would reduce irregular migration. She said the government had “paved the way” with its increase in border controls and other measures that were “effective and compatible with European law”.

A swathe of related security measures would be presented to the Bundestag on Thursday, she said.

The measures are among a number of new rules Germany has introduced in recent years after a large number of migrant arrivals, many of them people escaping war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. NGOs, including Amnesty International, on Tuesday said the proposed measures were in danger of “hollowing out” asylum law.

In a joint appeal to the German government it said that seeking protection in Germany and Europe from human rights violations “is part of the DNA of democracy”, after the experiences of the second world war. “The misconduct of individuals should never lead to people being stigmatised across the board and marked as not belonging to society,” the appeal said.

Faeser’s announcement was seen as an attempt to regain control of a debate that has dominated recent state election campaigns, with opposition and far-right and far-left candidates seizing on voters’ concerns over integration, security and strained public services, including housing and education.

Most focus has been given to a knife attack that killed three people at a festival in the western city of Solingen last month, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. The main suspect was a man from Syria who was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria where he had applied for asylum.

An 18-year-old Austrian armed with a rifle and mounted bayonet was last week shot dead in Munich on a square near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi documentation centre. The man, of Bosnian origin, who it is believed had been radicalised, had crossed the Austrian border into Germany.

Three months ago, an alleged Islamist from Afghanistan whose asylum claim had been turned down, but who had not been deported, stabbed and killed a policeman in the city of Mannheim.

Over the past year, various other Islamist attacks in Germany and France have been foiled by authorities and dozens of arrests have been made across Europe.

Migration remains the main issue on voters’ agenda before an election in the northern state of Brandenburg in less than two weeks. The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), to which Scholz and Faeser belong, are battling to maintain control of the state, with the outcome seen as a likely determinant in the future of Scholz’s government, especially ahead of a federal election in a year’s time.

Tension has been building on the issue over almost a decade. In 2015, the government of Angela Merkel allowed about a million people, most of whom had fled Syria and Iraq, to arrive under what is sometimes referred to as an “open door” policy. More recently, it granted automatic asylum to an estimated 1 million Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s 2022 invasion, at the same time as Germany was tackling an energy and cost of living crisis.

Tighter controls were introduced last year on Germany’s land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. Those, together with existing controls on its border with Austria, have led to the return of about 30,000 people since October 2023, the government said on Monday. According to its own statistics, applications for asylum fell by 22% between January and August, which it said was as a result of its tighter measures.

It has also focused on implementing existing deportation regulations, and restarted the repatriation of convicted criminals of Afghan nationality, despite human rights concerns after the Taliban seized power in 2021. A recent operation to return a plane load of Afghans was given widespread publicity in what was seen as a sign to the German electorate that the government was acting.

Countries in the Schengen region, which includes every EU member state except for Cyprus and Ireland, may introduce border controls only as a last resort, in order to prevent threats to internal security. Germany has habitually introduced the controls around sporting events, such as the recent Uefa European football championship.

Questions are being asked as to how Germany will be able to sustain the proper, long-term control of the frontier it shares with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. Heads of police have voiced concern about a lack of personnel and resources.