James Rothwell
Berlin Correspondent
19 September 2024 12:58pm
Germany should abolish the constitutional right to asylum as it will allow the country to set quotas on refugees, the interior minister of the eastern state of Brandenburg has said, in an apparent bid to appease the hard-Right.
Michael Stübgen, a member of the centre-right CDU, said the law should be amended as Germany already subscribes to the Geneva Convention on refugees, making it redundant.
“The individual right to asylum is no longer necessary in the Basic Law [German constitution] because we already grant protection to people who are persecuted under the rules of the Geneva Refugee Convention,” he said. “That is why I am in favour of anchoring the Geneva Refugee Convention as an institutional guarantee in the Basic Law.”
He added that the reform would allow Germany to introduce its own quota system for refugees. “We will then decide who comes into our country. And we can decide to what extent we can accept and integrate migrants.”
Germany’s mainstream parties are expected to be roundly defeated in this weekend’s Brandenburg state elections, where the hard-Right AfD party is projected to take nearly 30 per cent of the vote.
‘Nationwide border controls’
Irregular migration has quickly become Germany’s most fierce political issue after a knife attack at a music festival in Western Germany where a Syrian man murdered three people.
Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Germany, this week introduced nationwide border controls in response to calls for a much tougher migration policy, expanding checks already in place with the country’s eastern EU neighbours.
Increased tensions over migration have also been seized upon by the CDU party, which is at risk of losing support to the AfD in both the Brandenburg state election and the general election in September 2025.
It came as a new poll suggested that confidence in Mr Scholz’s traffic light coalition had fallen to just three per cent, with voters venting their frustration about the lack of tougher migration controls in Germany.
The survey of a thousand Germans, conducted in late August and early September, found that only three per cent felt the SPD, Greens and FDP coalition was good for the country.
A quarter of respondents said they were hoping for a powerful, one-party majority in the next election while 54 per cent said they wanted to see the CDU party return to government.
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