Austrian moves on asylum seekers ups pressure on Merkel

Austria has announced it will cap the number of asylum applications this year and, from next week, will only allow would-be refugees into the country if they want to file for asylum in Germany.

Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner made the announcement after Germany began returning asylum seekers over the Bavarian-Austrian border, and 10 days after Sweden introduced ID checks on its borders.

From Monday, Austria will no longer admit people who say they are seeking asylum in Sweden or elsewhere, and thus risk being returned.

Once Austria reaches its asylum limit, the minister added, applications will be accepted but no longer processed. Ms Mikl-Leitner declined to put a number on the cap but said “everyone knows it’s not possible” for Austria accept another 120,000 as in 2015.

"Those who lie above this limit will brought to transit zones or buffer zones, they will not be let into the country, they will be cared for there and nowhere else," said Ms Mikl-Leitner of Austria's conservative People's Party, junior coalition partner in Vienna.

In a dig at her Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) coalition partner – and at Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin – she added that the time had come to "say goodbye to the Willkommenskultur [welcoming culture]" of last year.

Austria’s move news ratchets up already growing political pressure on Dr Merkel.

Growing criticism

With criticism growing daily from senior allies in her

Christian Democratic Union

(CDU), ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder has described as “dangerous” Dr Merkel’s strategy.

“One could get the impression that national borders have no longer have meaning. That is dangerous and also not right,” said Mr Schröder, German leader from 1998 to 2005, to the Handelsblatt business daily. “The capacities for admission, care and integration of refugees in Germany are limited, anything else is an illusion.”

To date Dr Merkel has declined to cap asylum applications into Germany, insisting that a European strategy will reduce numbers. But Stephan Weil, CDU state premier in Lower Saxony, said he was certain "the chancellor will have to correct [her path] in the course of the year".

“Either it will be possible to throttle internationally the arrival numbers or we will have to do other things that no one wants and that will damage Europe,” he told Die Welt daily.

As Germany struggles, European countries, he said, were leaning back and mocking the “German invitation” to migrants.

Mr Weil criticised Dr Merkel’s “we can do this” maxim from last August as “rather trite”, considering it was not the chancellor but organisations at state level that were struggling with the consequences of her strategy.

“People perceive that the state doesn’t have a handle on the situation,” he said.

No mandate

Meanwhile Dr Merkel’s CSU Bavarian allies, on the front line of the migration crisis and to date her staunchest critics, have stepped up their campaign against the chancellor. Markus Söder, Bavarian finance minister and likely state premier next year, has warned Dr Merkel that she has no mandate and thus no democratic legitimacy for her migration policy.

"If we have to send a few soldiers to a foreign mission we have to ask the Bundestag, but when we let more than a million people into our country then our parliament should also have the last word," he said in Saturday's edition of Der Spiegel.

Germany’s migration policy shift last year was a response to humanitarian need, he said, “but the Bundestag was never asked if it wants a long-time continuation of a state of emergency”.

Mr Söder warned the German leader that the window for action was closing and that Berlin needed a “Plan B” should European measures to reduce asylum numbers prove ineffective.

The German leader is hearing similar warnings from her own backbenchers in Berlin. According to several reports, a petition is doing the rounds in the CDU, collecting signatures of MPs who want their leader to reverse her migration policies.

Meanwhile, Friday’s Bild tabloid reported that 51,395 applications for asylum have been filed so far this year in Germany. If that rate continues, Germany will break last year’s record of 1.1 million asylum seekers.