German minister says EU should PAY members to take ITS migrants as row with Merkel brews
ANGELA Merkel is facing serious stumbling blocks when trying to negotiate a coalition deal with her rival party as MPs disagree on how to deal with the biggest issue of immigration.
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Chancellor Merkel's 2015 decision to open the doors to more than a million migrants, many fleeing war in the Middle East, transformed Germany's demographic landscape and boosted the far right, hurting her bloc and the SPD in September's election.
In separate interviews, Thomas Strobl, deputy leader of Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and SPD foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel outlined ways of winning back disenchanted supporters.
Sigmar Gabriel, whose party's restive membership would be unlikely to accept harsh rules on to cut migrant numbers, wants Germany to reward regions financially if they take in a share of the huge number of migrants in the country.
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Mr Gabriel, who was foreign minister under the last German government, told the Funke newspaper group: "That way municipalities would decide themselves how many refugees to take.
"That would avoid citizens gaining the impression that refugees get everything and we get nothing."
Germany has argued in vain for the stream of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa to be divided proportionately between the European Union's member states, with poorer, more ethnically homogenous eastern members particularly set against the idea.
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That would avoid citizens gaining the impression that refugees get everything and we get nothing
Mr Gabriel added: "The EU could establish a programme to help municipalities in poorer countries with the financing.”
But Mr Strobl told the Heilbronner Stimme newspaper Germany should cap the number of new immigrants at 65,000 a year, the level in 2012, and far below the limit of 200,000 that the conservatives had previously advocated.
Mrs Merkel has given herself just a matter of days to establish a new coalition, after months of talks have failed to bring a deal.
A renewed conservative-SPD ‘grand coalition’ is her best chance of securing a fourth term as chancellor, but previous self-imposed deadlines have already been missed after talks with the Green party and Freedom Democratic Party failed.
Talks are expected to begin on January 7, with Mrs Merkel wanting to reach a deal by the middle of the month.
She blamed her September 24 election losses on concern at migration and now favours a tougher stance on deporting migrants accused of crimes.
The SPD's membership, which must ratify any government deal, is cautious about repeating the experience of a grand coalition, for which voters rewarded it with a drubbing in the polling booths.
While Mr Gabriel is not a member of the SPD's negotiating team, his proposal could prove popular with the party's broadly more pro-European rank-and-file, and especially with party leader Martin Schulz, a former European Parliament president.
