Migration: CDU man Frei: reject refugees on Europe’s coasts

After his controversial asylum push, the CDU politician Thorsten Frei called for tougher action against refugees who come to Europe via the Mediterranean. “It must be possible to reject illegal migrants on Europe’s coasts,” said the first parliamentary secretary of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag to the “Welt”. If boats are apprehended in international waters in the Mediterranean, the people on board would of course be rescued. “But the journey then does not lead to a European shore, but back to where they came from.”

The CDU politician received support from party leader Friedrich Merz. He said in the ZDF summer interview: “My position is very simple and very clear that I welcome every proposal and consider it worth considering and discussing that fulfills two things. The problem must be reduced. And we must continue to meet our human rights obligations in the world.” Germany must remain a country that helps the world. “But this help must not be misused either, and it is misused hundreds of thousands of times. And we have to do something about it.”

The deputy federal chairman of the Christian-Democratic Workers’ Union (CDA), Christian Bäumler, held up Merz’s gradual opening to the right. The Federal Constitutional Court had decided that the protection of human dignity in the Basic Law resulted in a ban on the refusal of refugees at the border. “Friedrich Merz should rather read the Bible and the Basic Law instead of squinting to the right,” Bäumler told the German Press Agency.

Greens warn against populist debate

The domestic policy spokeswoman for the Greens in the Bundestag, Lamya Kaddor, accused the Union of “an inhumane position that is incompatible with international law”. “What we don’t need, especially in view of the latest AfD survey results, are populist debates about the right to asylum,” she told the editorial network Germany. “Because in the end this populism only pays off for the right-wing populists and right-wing extremists.”

In a new Insa survey for “Bild am Sonntag”, the AfD has now risen to 22 percent nationwide and is only four percentage points behind the Union.

When asked whether he wanted so-called pushbacks to be legalized, Frei said: If someone is apprehended without protection in international waters, the journey does not have to lead to a European port. “Emotionally charged, unclear legal terms such as pushbacks” are not very helpful for a factual debate.

Pushbacks, i.e. rejecting people seeking protection at the external borders, are illegal under international law. Nonetheless, Greece, for example, on the Mediterranean coast, is suspected of systematically pushing back migrants to Turkey. Aid organizations and the media accuse the government in Athens of this.

Sharp criticism from the traffic light

A few days ago, Frei had already proposed the extensive abolition of individual entitlements to asylum. In a guest article for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, he advocated replacing this with a European quota solution for taking in refugees. 300,000 to 400,000 people per year should be selected directly abroad and then distributed in Europe. This move had been sharply criticized by the traffic light. The federal government emphasized that it is sticking to the individual right to asylum.

The CDU chairman Merz made it clear that the initiative was coordinated with him. The sister party CSU reacted very cautiously. From their point of view, the proposal is not suitable for quickly solving the current problems of the municipalities in coping with the sharp increase in the influx of refugees.

Frei received support from the non-party mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer. Frei’s concept would find much greater acceptance among “citizens who are skeptical about migration” than the current system, the former Green Party politician wrote in an article for “Welt”. This gives more and more people the impression “as if the state were helpless in the face of an ever-increasing number of people fleeing poverty, who could force their way into their own village, their own neighborhood”.

Call for nationwide border controls

To limit illegal migration, Hesse’s Prime Minister Boris Rhein called for nationwide border controls. “The federal government must finally ensure that fewer people come to Germany illegally. To do this, we need comprehensive controls at Germany’s external borders,” said the CDU politician to “Bild am Sonntag”. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) must implement them immediately.

Rhein and Faeser are competitors in the state elections in Hesse on October 8th. The CDU prime minister wants to defend his office there, and the interior minister is challenging him as the SPD’s top candidate.

Merz shared Rhein’s position on ZDF: “If we cannot protect the European external borders well, we must be able to protect the European internal borders, our national borders. We must know who is coming to Germany.”