Germany’s conservative parties shift further to the right
By
Peter Schwarz
11 October 2017
After ten hours of negotiation on Sunday, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union (CSU), agreed on a common approach for negotiations on a future government coalition with the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens. The result of the talks is a clear shift to the right that will also determine the policy of the next German government.
The dominant issue in the talks was setting a ceiling on the number of refugees, a dispute that has been raging for the past two years between the CDU and CSU—collectively known as the Union. The leader of the CSU, Horst Seehofer, has long insisted on a limit on refugees, declaring it to be a prerequisite for his party’s participation in a new government. CDU leader Angela Merkel has so far rejected such a ceiling.
The CSU has now prevailed in substance, while making a concession to the CDU in words. The two parties agreed that no more than 200,000 people should be admitted annually to Germany for humanitarian reasons (asylum seekers or refugees), but the word “ceiling” is not mentioned in the agreement.
Newly arrived asylum seekers are to be detained in special “residence centres” and their asylum procedures are to be bundled into so-called “decision-making and recycling centres.” They are thus effectively deprived of their freedom. The Union parties have refrained from using the word “camp” only because of its historical associations with the period of Nazi rule.
The deal struck at the expense of refugees, the weakest section of society, is only the surface appearance of a much more fundamental turn to the right. Both the CSU and the CDU lost…