The Austrian government announced Tuesday it would step up border controls at checkpoints along its southern frontier with Italy, Slovenia and Hungary in a bid to slow the migrant influx. "There will be different structural measures from containers to further barriers" similar to the short mesh fence recently set up at Austria's main border crossing with Slovenia at Spielfeld, Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said.
The announcement deals a new blow to German Chancellor Angela Merkel who wants to promote a deal with Turkey at an upcoming EU summit to tackle to the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II. But Austria, which initially supported Merkel's call for a European solution, has adopted an increasingly hard-line stance after receiving 90,000 asylum claims last year - one of the bloc's highest rates per capita.
"We are preparing Plan B not because we want it, but because the implementation of a European solution is too slow," Austrian Chancellor Werner Merkel told the Oesterreich newspaper Tuesday. Vienna has also joined the so-called "Visegrad Four" group - Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - in their push to close the Balkans refugee route by shutting off Greece, which they accuse of failing to protect the EU's external borders.
Merkel on Tuesday strongly criticised the proposal: "Do we really want to give up already and close the Greek-Macedonian-Bulgarian border, with all the consequences this would have for Greece and the European Union as a whole and therefore the Schengen area?" Austrian controls will be increased at checkpoints in the states of Carinthia, Styria, Burgenland as well as Tyrol, which shares a border with Italy. "The aim is to secure the order and stability of our country. That's why we put the brakes on," Mikl-Leitner stressed.
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