In fact, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (VP) and his German counterpart Horst Seehofer (CSU) agree on a lot. For example, Seehofer criticized the EU Commission’s asylum policy in an interview with the German “Bild am Sonntag”. This has “lost dramatically in strength in the past few years”, so Seehofer’s judgment.
Recently, Nehammer had repeatedly accused the EU Commission of doing too little to combat illegal migration to Europe and, in particular, to Austria. When looking for the cause, there is a veritable difference between Seehofer and Nehammer: The CSU man identified “the egoism of some EU member states” as the reason for missing joint steps – and explicitly named Austria.
For Germany, reliable cooperation on the subject of migration only exists with France, complained Seehofer.
“No political category”
His party colleague Nehammer promptly countered yesterday: “For me as Minister of the Interior, egoism is not a politically relevant category,” he said, “I am responsible for the people living in Austria and their safety.” Once again, Nehammer referred to the above-average figures of the Austrian asylum policy: “Over 207,000 asylum applications and over 133,000 protection grants since 2015” there is no need to comment. Why Austria will defend itself against overloading the system. Yesterday, Nehammer named the Danish Interior Minister Mattias Tesfaye as an ally.
Deportation to Afghanistan
Seehofer and Nehammer then agreed again on one thing: the CSU politician also wants to hold on to deportations to the country despite the recent advance of the radical Islamic Taliban in Afghanistan. “We are currently negotiating with Afghanistan so that we can continue to deport criminals there,” he said.
Nehammer had only announced last week that Austria also wanted to force deportations to Afghanistan, and put pressure on the EU in this matter.
