Berlin: Germany deported a record 80,000 migrants denied asylum last year and that figure will rise again in 2017, a top official said, as Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to win back conservative voters before elections in September.
Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s chief of staff, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper that nearly half of 700,000 asylum requests made in 2016 had been rejected, spelling another record high in deportations this year.
To placate conservatives put off by Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open German borders to refugees, leaders of her Christian Democrat party (CDU) have been pushing to deport more migrants whose applications have failed or foreigners who have committed crimes.
Altmaier said it was important to send these people home promptly to maintain a high level of public support for the asylum system.
Germany has taken in more than a million migrants in the last 18 months. Those seeking asylum need to show they would face persecution at home. Many whose applications are rejected have nevertheless been allowed to stay temporarily, a practice that Merkel’s conservatives want to scale back.
“We sent home 80,000 last year whose asylum applications were rejected — that’s a record,” Altmaier said. “And the number will rise again further. There were some 700,000 asylum applications in 2016 and nearly 300,000 were rejected. We’ll be sending these people home quickly because if we don’t it’ll damage our credibility as a state based on the rule of law.”
The Christian Social Union (CSU), wants an upper limit of 200,000 refugees per year.
Merkel has refused that demand and the two parties have suffered a slump in support as a result of their squabbling before the September 24 election.
Altmaier said he hoped the upper house of parliament, where the SPD and Greens can block the government, would soon agree to change the status of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco to allow automatic and swift rejections of asylum seekers from those countries. He also said that rejected asylum-seekers can live safely in some parts of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have moved ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in an opinion poll by the Emnid institute for the first time since 2006, Bild am Sonntag said.
The SPD’s unexpected surge of some 12 points in the last month has caught Merkel and her conservatives off guard, analysts said, just seven months before the September 24 election, where she had expected to win a fourth term easily.
The Emnid poll of 1,885 voters gave the SPD 33 percent of the vote, up 1 point in the last week, while the CDU and their Bavarian sister party CSU would win 32 percent, down 1 point.
The SPD has now gained a record-breaking 12 points in the last four weeks, according to Bild am Sonntag, since former European Parliament president Martin Schulz was named as its candidate to run against Merkel.
“The increase is unmatched in the history of the Bild am Sonntag polls,” the newspaper wrote.
