After blocking the file for months, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz finally decided to stop holding up the so-called crisis regulation—a key mechanism under the EU’s new Asylum and Migration Pact—allowing the interinstitutional negotiations on the package to resume. However, the social democrat chancellor’s last-minute decision split the German government coalition, as the Greens continue to refuse their support for the approval, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Thursday, September 28th.
The “crisis regulation” is a proposed mechanism to allow frontline member states to use different screening and border procedure rules (such as extending detention up to 20 weeks) under particularly high migratory pressure recognized by the European Council as a “crisis.”
Moreover, it would also prohibit other EU member states from returning migrants to the first country they arrived in (under the Dublin rules), if that’s in a state of crisis, as well as allow the frontline country to request a modification of the EU-wide migrant redistribution targets.
The last Council negotiations among EU ministers on the file ended at an impasse in July after Germany—along with the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—refused to lend its support for it.
With no quick resolution in sight, MEPs of the European Parliament voted last week to suspend interinstitutional negotiations on the crisis regulation until the Council manages to come up with a unified position.
On Tuesday, EPP chief Manfred Weber called for the German government to stop blocking the regulation so that the parliamentary negotiations could resume, giving a chance for the entire Pact to be finalized before the EP closes down in April ahead of the 2024 EU elections.
The reason Weber and other MEPs put only Berlin in the spotlight is because a qualified majority (instead of unanimity) is enough to move the legislation forward at the ministerial level, therefore all the other opponents can be ignored as long as Germany is on board.
It appears the pressure worked, as Chancellor Scholz announced on Wednesday that he and the social-democrat SDP are ready to give the green light to the crisis regulation, immediately joined by the smallest coalition member, the liberal FDP.
On the other hand, the Greens are still on the fence and have so far refused to change their position. “We want to ensure orderly procedures with the [asylum] reform, which the crisis regulation threatens to destroy through the back door,” the Greens’ parliamentary director Irene Mihalic said on Wednesday, quoting Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s Sunday statement. “By rejecting the crisis regulation, we are blocking chaos.”
Nonetheless, the SDP and the FDP are confident that they will soon manage to reach a compromise with their coalition partner so that the German government can officially back the proposal. The issue was given key priority at the meeting of EU home affairs ministers on Thursday, but it wasn’t put to vote yet without Berlin’s united support.
