German Chancellor Angela Merkel's hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer is unhappy with an EU-wide deal she struck last week to reduce migration, sources told AFP Sunday, sharpening a crisis that threatens to bring down her conservative alliance. After his Bavarian CSU party spent weeks pressuring Merkel to toughen immigration and asylum policy, Seehofer complained to allies that he had endured a "conversation with no effect" with the chancellor Saturday, the sources said.
CSU leaders gathered in Munich from 3:00 pm (1300 GMT) to decide their response to the EU deal, while Merkel and her top lieutenants were set to huddle later Sunday in Berlin. European leaders agreed Friday new measures to reduce immigration to the bloc and so-called "secondary migration" of asylum-seekers between countries.
Merkel, who has been in office since 2005, warned ahead of the summit that the issue of migration could decide the very future of the EU itself.
Earlier Sunday, Merkel told broadcaster ZDF she would do "everything possible to achieve results that mean we can continue to assume responsibility for our country", adding that "everyone knows the situation is serious" between her centre-right CDU and their CSU allies.
Seehofer, who is CSU leader as well as federal interior minister, rejected her assessment that the EU-wide measures would "have the same effect" as his demand to turn away at the border asylum-seekers already registered in other EU nations.
If he orders border police to go ahead with the scheme in defiance of the chancellor, Merkel would be forced to fire him, in turn prompting a CSU walkout that would cost her her majority in parliament.
Backing for the longtime German leader came from leading figures in the CDU, with Hesse state premier Volker Bouffier warning that it would be "extremely ill-advised to take national measures without consulting others".
"We should keep a cool head," he added.
The Bavarian party's discontent comes despite many of its longstanding migration demands appearing in the EU summit deal. "Good decisions were taken at the summit, Europe has taken a big step forward," CSU deputy chief Manfred Weber, who leads the centre-right EPP group in the European Parliament, said.
"The CSU has rocked Europe in the last few weeks," he added. Leaders agreed Friday to consider setting up "disembarkation platforms" outside the EU, most likely in North Africa, in a bid to discourage migrants and refugees boarding EU-bound smuggler boats.
Member countries could also create processing centres to determine whether the new arrivals are returned home as economic migrants or admitted as refugees in willing states. At the national level, Merkel also proposes that migrants arriving in Germany who first registered in another EU country should be placed in special "admissions centres" under restrictive conditions, according to a document she sent to the CSU and coalition partners the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
The document also outlined deals with 16 other countries to return already-registered migrants if they reached Germany. In a newspaper interview, Germany's EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger reminded fellow conservatives Merkel's "respect and authority" among member countries were "very valuable for Germany, no-one should destroy it".
But several central European nations including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia denied they had agreed to accept returned migrants. The chancellor's frantic last-minute diplomacy was ultimately prompted by the CSU's fear of losing its cherished absolute majority in Bavaria's state parliament.
The "Free State" with its beer-and-lederhosen Alpine traditions, powerful industries and impenetrable dialect has a more conservative bent than other German regions.
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