When Irish navy vessel LE William Butler Yeats docked in Hamburg this week, locals came aboard to learn about the crew's humanitarian work in a joint EU mission, tackling human traffickers and saving about 17,500 lives in the Mediterranean.
One life Irish sailors can’t save is that of chancellor Angela Merkel, who travels to Brussels on Sunday for an emergency informal meeting of about 10 EU leaders. Though ostensibly about refugees, the gathering – ahead of next week’s proper EU summit – is really about saving her Berlin coalition, her centre-right political alliance and her future as German leader.
All of this is under threat because of a heated row between Merkel and her centre-right Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), over asylum seekers. Though numbers are down 17 per cent on last year – and half what they were in 2015 – CSU leader and federal interior minister Horst Seehofer has reactivated the issue with a threat to close German borders to people already refused asylum here, or who have sought asylum elsewhere in the EU.
Defying Merkel’s wishes would force her to fire him, collapsing her fourth-term coalition after little more than 100 days.
Days after the CSU gave her until July 1st to find a European solution, she told an event recalling Germany’s own postwar refugees that the phenomenon was “a pressing question for our time”.
“We need constructive, humane and European answers,” she told her audience, including Seehofer. In a nod to his political manoeuvering, she said this was “easier said than done”.
On Friday, Seehofer hit back, suggesting he might soon become the first German minister to be fired for “looking after security and order”.
“If the chancellery is not satisfied with the interior minister’s work,” he said, “then the coalition should end.”
Violent attacks
The CSU leader is so outspoken because, three years after the peak of Germany’s refugee crisis, the Bavarians feel they have public opinion on their side. Though figures show crime in Germany is at its lowest in 30 years, public perception has been influenced by a series of violent attacks.
In court this week alone: an Afghan man who stabbed to death his 15-year-old German girlfriend with a bread knife, and a Syrian who flogged a Kippa-wearing Israeli youth.
With about 57 per cent of Germans in favour of tighter border policies, even Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) backbenchers mutter that their leader looks tired, defensive and humiliated.
That’s no surprise given her survival now hinges on striking bilateral refugee deals with frontline countries like Greece and Italy, not traditional members of the Merkel fan club.
Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte couldn’t resist using his inaugural visit to Berlin to point out the irony of Merkel, long a believer in a pan-European refugee solution, being forced by her Bavarian allies into rushed bilateral arrangements.
Berlin, meanwhile, is not sure whether Conte has the final word in Rome or the far-right League interior minister Matteo Salvini, who threatened to boycott the mini-summit over a draft document he viewed as more concerned with saving Merkel than addressing Italian migration concerns.
Under the gun, the chancellor secured Paris backing this week to take back from Germany asylum seekers registered in France. She hopes for a similar signal next Tuesday in Berlin from Spain’s new prime minister Pedro Sánchez. Elsewhere in Europe, however, Merkel rivals sense a golden opportunity to topple – or weaken – the German leader.
Refugee quotas
The four Visegrád countries – Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – oppose EU refugee quotas and will stay away on Sunday because, as Polish prime minister Matteusz Morawiecki put it, “we don’t want to warm up proposals we’ve already rejected”.
Another busy player is Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, head of an anti-immigration populist coalition and, from July 1st, head of the EU’s rotating presidency.
"Angela Merkel has, like most in Europe, changed her migration path massively, and that is good and necessary," he tells Saturday's Bild tabloid, days after meeting Visegrád leaders and Bavarian state premier Markus Söder.
The Bavarian leader has rekindled the refugee issue to win back CSU supporters ahead of October’s state election. On Friday he argued his Bavaria is a conservative “counter model to Berlin”, where politicians “have convictions and implement things”.
Such a clear broadside at Merkel's pragmatic, hesitant leadership style is music to the ears of many, including impatient conservative rivals in her CDU. Many of them nodded in agreement at Friday's opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily headlined "Merkel and the division of Europe".
It attacked this week’s Franco-German proposals for a euro-zone budget as “simply not acceptable”, suggesting they drew a dividing line through Europe’s euro and non-euro members “just to distract from her catastrophic failures in the refugee politics”.
With Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance crumbling, and her Social Democrat coalition laying the groundwork for a snap election, an unsettled summer looms.