The Federal Chancellor only offers the standard repertoire of cheap phrases in the Bundestag. Meanwhile, the pressure is growing in town and country.
There are few sentences on the sensitive issue of asylum and immigration that are as clumsy as this one: “Anyone who doesn’t get a right to stay here has to leave Germany again.” The Federal Chancellor himself recited it today in the Bundestag. But hardly a sentence is so blatantly at odds with reality, which is as complicated as it is frustrating. Alone: ??Olaf Scholz doesn’t seem to mind that much. For him, what is burning on the nails of those responsible and citizens in more and more towns and villages seems to be just fodder for the Scholz-o-Mat: Efforts are sold as successes, hardly measurable as progress, and otherwise his government has always been right located.
As stoically stable as the middle of Germany is, the bundle of issues of asylum, immigration and integration has fueled uncertainty and poisoned the mood. The AfD secured the issue of political survival in 2015/16, otherwise it would have disappeared. The right-wing riot party is celebrating its tenth birthday these days.
That’s what makes the chancellor’s appearance so annoying: it’s simply not true that the EU is making any significant progress in distributing asylum seekers. This is by no means the fault of the Germans alone, but from the point of view of those affected it does not change the failure.
In contrast, what CDU leader Friedrich Merz said in the Bundestag is very true: daycare centers, schools and the housing market are not prepared for several hundred thousand additional people who immigrate every year via various routes. You can’t blame individual asylum seekers from Africa, for example, or war refugees from Ukraine or Syria for that. You have to blame the federal and state governments for it. But the chancellor just ignores it: Was what?
Next week, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser will meet with the federal states and local authorities, but there is really no reason for the outcome to be greater than at a similar meeting in autumn. Meanwhile, the alarm calls from the provinces are getting shrill, and the xenophobes are rubbing their hands.
In order to maintain receptiveness and social peace in the middle, Olaf Scholz would have to show that he could at least bring about the mass repatriation of those who, at the end of all the proceedings, have no right to stay and maintenance. The group in question is not large enough to solve all the practical problems of day-care centers, schools or apartments. But it is a central touchstone for a government that wants to facilitate immigration and asylum applications in many places and better support the stay. Deportations should be the compensation for this. But it took more than a year just to get the responsible federal commissioner into office. Olaf Scholz sold it in the Bundestag as a success. Is that supposed to be funny?
The number of deportations per year has now halved from a low level, it is still a thirtieth of the persons formally obliged to leave the country. There are reasons for this: Very few countries of origin cooperate. Sustained resistance from rejected asylum seekers is often accepted without sanctions. And in the red-green-red-governed state of Berlin, according to reports, deportations are simply no longer being carried out at all. The federal government seems delighted that this thankless business is largely the responsibility of the municipalities or federal states. Nevertheless, she will be held politically accountable: this crisis will also catch up with the chancellor.
