Lack of migration plan could be German chancellor’s downfall

This is an interesting, if exhausting, time to be Angela Merkel.

For a decade in power Germany's chancellor has been first among equals in Brussels. But today, EU leaders are holding an emergency meeting in Berlin on a migration crisis that has left Merkel in a bind.

After accepting more than one million asylum seekers last year, the German leader is under the gun to secure agreement from her EU colleagues on a package of measures to secure a sustainable cut from this year in numbers coming to Europe – and Germany.

As in the euro crisis EU member states are deadlocked over the causes of this crisis and how best to address it. But Berlin no longer holds the reins.

Some countries are demanding a reintroduction of border measures to steer population flows; others have already gone ahead with this. Many of Germany’s EU partners blame Berlin for exacerbating a serious crisis.

Merkel disagrees with all of this. National measures are just sticking-plaster solutions, she says, demanding instead a pan-EU refugee redistribution effort combined with joint initiatives with Turkey and Nato.

After months of bad-tempered deadlock, and years of unequal refugee burden-sharing, senior German officials admit some blame in this crisis. Far away from the EU’s outer wall, they concede choosing not to hear SOS calls from Italy and Greece in the first years of the refugee crisis. And last year, they say, Berlin failed to act quickly enough to help avoid the shameful sight of the UN Food Programme halving rations to feed people in refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan.

Perhaps their gravest miscalculation was only clear in hindsight: the distorting effecting of WhatsApp whispers, where incorrect information and rumours from asylum seekers in Germany zipped down the Balkan Route to smartphones in Syria. But Berlin officials say they were not alone in Europe in underestimating this smartphone-steered mass migration.

Strategic error

However, the German leader bridles at the most frequently aired criticism of her – that she made a strategic error inviting to Germany last September Syrians trapped in Hungary.

Merkel insists it is nonsense to claim she started a stampede, pointing to steady growth in numbers last year – irrespective of her September decision. And, given that Germany has never closed its border to asylum applicants, she said, it could hardly throw open the border in September, as critics claim.

Another claim she rejects is that she has gone from euro crisis mistress to migration crisis supplicant. Her officials say the opposite is the case, that this is a show of strength from Germany until the rest of the EU realise what we are dealing with.

This is not a passing crisis, they say, but an epoch-changing global event requiring a new grand bargain in Brussels.

Looking out from Berlin, the greatest anger here is directed at Austria. Despite migration and domestic political pressures, Merkel officials are furious at Vienna's unilateral decision to impose an 80-a-day asylum cap – particularly as they know Austria was egged on by the Christian Democratic Unions's (CDU) allies in Bavaria.

German officials are surprisingly sanguine about the Berlin-critical front presented by the Visegrád group in central Europe. They view the Czechs as constructive, the Poles as possibly pragmatic. As for Hungary, they are optimistic that even President Viktor Orban will back further EU migration initiatives if they are bedded down in strategic efforts to strengthen outer EU borders.

As for the Berlin-backed plan to finance refugee efforts in Turkey, Merkel officials point to the buy-in from apathetic partners at last month’s summit. Much detail and financing has yet to be worked out, but German officials are optimistic Ankara will accept that an alliance with the EU is the only way to manage its own migration crisis.

But given dramatic scenes on the Greek-Macedonian border, and a looming spring jump in refugee numbers, time is running out for Merkel.

Three state elections on March 13th are likely to see big wins for hard-right, migration-critical Alternative für Deutschland. Merkel’s Christian Democrat backbenchers are getting restless, as are ordinary Germans.

Joined-up solution

More than three quarters (77 per cent) of Germans in an ARD public television poll agree with her that only a joined-up European solution will actually solve the migration crisis, but less than a third (32 per cent) believe such a solution is within reach.

So how likely is it that the migration crisis will trigger a putsch against Merkel? The answer to that question poses another question: who will take her out? In her CDU, the only public criticism to date of their leader has come from political nobodies or has-beens.

Even Der Spiegel, no stranger to over-egging the pudding, has admitted that the internal party "list of names ready to rise against Merkel is not yet very long".

Of course that could change. In the traditionally putsch-averse CDU, and the wider population, there is real, simmering anger over the long-term cultural consequences of this crisis. And no one should underestimate the German cultural aversion to not having a plan.

And in the migration crisis, this is what Merkel has admitted: driving by sight and asking her voters to trust her on this.

Despite her insistence that she has no plan B on migration, Merkel admitted in January that lack of progress in Brussels today will force a rapid rethink in Berlin.