EFriedrich Merz is one step further than Angela Merkel. He invited Gerald Knaus to dinner at the CDU headquarters. It is November 5th, Sunday evening before the Prime Minister’s Conference, which is supposed to finally bring solutions to important questions of migration policy. Knaus, Austrian sociologist and head of the European Stability Initiative think tank, has been one of the most popular thought leaders on migration policy among top German politicians for years.
The SPD parliamentary group has already invited him. In the years of large refugee flows in 2015 and 2016, Angela Merkel did a lot when developing her refugee deal with Turkey that was similar to Knaus’s ideas. However, there is said to have been no meeting between the Chancellor and the migration expert at that time.
Now, at Merz’s invitation, he sat down with the CDU party leadership and explained his plans. This also includes the idea of carrying out asylum procedures outside of Europe. An idea that has also been discussed in the Union for some time. Not only since the invitation to Knaus did it become clear to Merz that this concept – also mentioned in the traffic light coalition agreement – would also be taken up within his own ranks. At the end of September, the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst, spoke out in favor of this for the first time in an interview with the FAZ. At the end of October, Knaus’ concept was included in the CDU executive committee resolution “For humanity and order: Stop illegal migration – act together now” and Merz’s 26-point catalog for the negotiations with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on the German Migration Pact.
Hidden object in the CDU – Scholz does his part
“Everyone was in the picture,” says the CDU. Nevertheless, there is the interpretation that North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst not only surprised the SPD state leaders at the recent Prime Minister’s Conference with the proposal, but also the Union and possibly even tried to exclude Merz from his Germany Pact talks with the Chancellor. The fact that this reading can hold up is probably due to the fact that the Union is currently a hidden object when it comes to migration policy, where it is not so easy to see who wants what, who is in concert with whom or who is hatching an intrigue against whom . Things are not made any easier by the fact that Chancellor Scholz is doing his part to make the picture seem even more crowded.
Just as Merz (also) wanted to push the traffic light, which was in serious trouble not only in migration issues, with the help of the German Pact, Scholz tried to force the CDU’s top staff to immediately withdraw from the negotiations of the Prime Minister’s Conference (MPK) in the Chancellery with a scattered allusion to the latent leadership debate in the largest opposition party. Or at least annoying. It was about a commission that should fundamentally talk about migration issues. The Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, CDU, has been promoting this idea for a long time. There was talk of this commission working across party lines.
Scholz remarked to the state leaders that he could then stop his meetings with CDU chairman Merz. Wüst then got in touch. Scholz: “Ah, now Mr. Wüst is in touch. Let’s see what he has to say.” In North Rhine-Westphalia, people ultimately stick together, said the Chancellor, alluding to the fact that Wüst and Merz both come from the most populous federal state. Wüst countered. Ultimately, Scholz also didn’t think the cross-party idea was a good idea because then he would have ended up at the same table with the AfD and perhaps even Sahra Wagenknecht. The Chancellor’s intrigue to divide the Union? That would probably be an exaggeration. The incident was called a “smug aperçu” in Chancellor circles. Even in the CSU, which likes to take aim at the traffic lights and the Chancellor, the incident was given lower priority. He would rather attribute this to Olaf Scholz’s professionalism, “to throw a stink bomb into a round like this,” said a leading CSU man.
#Friedrich #Merz #Hendrik #Wüst #determines #migration #policy #CDU