Alone
in Berlin: How Merkel Has Gambled Away Her EU Power
With
her refugee policies, Chancellor Merkel has isolated Germany to a
greater degree than any of her predecessors. The Balkan Route has
been closed down against her will and many EU leaders believe her
overtures to Turkey are delusional. By SPIEGEL Staff
March
11, 2016 – 06:43 PM
There were times
when interactions between the German chancellor and European Council
President Donald Tusk were more congenial. When Angela Merkel entered
the conference hall at the European Council building in Brussels,
Tusk would bow deeply and clasp Merkel's hand. He would then kiss it
so intimately that even Merkel, who is used to all manner of
obsequiousness, would look in quizzical confusion at the former
Polish prime minister's bowed head.
On Wednesday, Merkel
got to know a different Tusk. Once again, he sent Merkel a greeting,
but this time he opted to use Twitter instead of his lips. He sent
out a tweet thanking the countries of the Western Balkans for closing
their borders to refugees and "implementing part of EU's
comprehensive strategy to deal with migration crisis."
It was not exactly a
gallant move from Tusk. For weeks, Merkel has been trying to prevent
the closure of the Balkan Route, arguing that Europe cannot leave
Greece alone to deal with tens of thousands of desperate Syrians
trying to escape the civil war in their country. Three weeks ago,
when Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann announced his country would
only accept a limited number of asylum-seekers each day -- an
announcement that led to border closures up and down the Balkans --
Merkel shook her head with concern. The move, she said, was "not
helpful."
And now Tusk. The
man who was only able to rise to the European Council presidency with
Merkel's backing has now ambushed her.
It is yet another
incident that demonstrates Merkel's loss of power. The chancellor has
played a variety of roles in Brussels throughout her career. She
began as a clumsy novice, but as a result of the euro crisis she
ultimately became the most powerful leader in Europe. Now, however,
she has isolated Germany in the European Union to a greater degree
than any chancellor before her.
Germany has always
had a special role in Europe. Helmut Kohl emphasized modesty in
Brussels to reduce European fears of a newly dominant Germany in the
wake of reunification. Merkel, by contrast, was not afraid of taking
a leadership role and pushed through her strict austerity policies.
In the end, though, she stopped short of throwing Greece out of the
euro zone against the will of France and other southern European
member states.
Defection to the
Enemy Camp
Now, the fissure
runs through the entire continent. Germany and France are estranged,
Eastern European member states have joined Austria in an anti-Merkel
alliance and European Council President Tusk has defected to the
enemy camp.
Merkel has remained
true to her convictions -- one has to grant her that. She has
withstood domestic pressure -- primarily exerted by the Christian
Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to her Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) -- and she has resisted the pressure of
Faymann in Austria and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With
three important German state elections approaching this Sunday, she
has also resisted pressure from CDU campaigners, who are not
expecting a glorious showing. If one judges politicians by how well
they stick to their principles, even when it gets uncomfortable, then
Merkel has been impressive in recent weeks.
But what Merkel's
people describe as rectitude, the rest of Europe sees as an attempt
to spread the costs of her noble-minded blunder across the entire
European Union. The fences that have now been built do not just
prevent refugees from moving through the Continent -- they're also
symbolic of resistance to German presumption.
When Merkel stepped
before gathered journalists late on Monday night following the
special EU summit in Brussels, she spoke of a "breakthrough"
in the refugee crisis. But that claim too was an affront. The same
Merkel who has brandished her moral fortitude by criticizing border
closures and barbed wire fences is nevertheless prepared to make
herself dependent on a Turkish government that is transforming its
country step-by-step into an autocracy.
Nothing reveals
Merkel's hypocrisy more than her handling of the Balkan Route
closure. With only a few hundred migrants a day now reaching Germany,
Merkel is perhaps the greatest profiteer of the border closures. But
it is the result of policies imposed by her political adversaries.
Not only that, but these policies were originally supposed to receive
the European stamp of approval at Monday's summit. For the summit's
closing document, Tusk proposed the following statement in reference
to the Balkan Route: "This route is now closed." The
sentence is a statement of fact, but Merkel nevertheless refused to
sign on. Doing so would have been a public admission of failure.
The result was a
tenacious battle over terminology. When EU member state ambassadors
assembled on Sunday afternoon to prepare the summit, the German
representative Reinhard Silberberg protested. But Tusk's cabinet
chief Piotr Serafin remained firm, Silberberg communicated in a
classified cable to Berlin that evening. The countries affected along
the Balkan Route, he wrote, "expect a clear indication of
support from the … European Council."
Higher Powers
When European heads
of state and government arrived in Brussels on Monday, the quarrel
had not yet been resolved. Before he entered the Council building,
French President François Hollande said: "This route is
closed." Later, an argument erupted between Faymann and Merkel.
A rift could only be avoided by way of compromise. The final document
ultimately stated: "Irregular flows of migrants along the
Western Balkan route have now come to an end." It makes it sound
as though higher powers stopped the migrants in their path.
The price for the
cosmetic improvement was high. In return, Eastern European member
states received the guarantee that no further demands that they
accept refugees -- neither from Greece nor from Turkey -- will be
made. For Merkel, that is not a positive result.
She continues to
insist that border closures cannot solve the refugee crisis, instead
placing her hopes on the deal with Turkey. To take part in the
negotiations, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu arrived in
Brussels on Sunday evening for a meeting with Merkel and Dutch Prime
Minister Mark Rutte, who currently holds the rotating presidency of
the Council of Europe.
The meeting itself
was unusual enough, with many EU countries unimpressed by Merkel's
diplomatic offensive. But when it became known that the Turks had
presented a completely new proposal during the confidential meeting,
rumors began making the rounds that Merkel was trying to hoodwink the
other EU member states.
Spanish Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy only learned of the Turkish paper after he
landed at the Brussels airport. When it was distributed at the
beginning of the summit, Luxembourgian Prime Minister Xavier Bettel
took a photo of it with his smartphone and sent it to his aides so
they could quickly examine it.
The mood was tense
when the leaders gathered for a late lunch at 3 p.m. Most made it
clear that they would be unable to agree to a deal without having
first perused the Turkish proposal in detail. Before long, many began
to suspect that the paper had actually been authored by Merkel's
chief advisor on European affairs, Uwe Corsepius -- and not by the
Turks. Merkel vehemently denied the allegations. But the incident
serves to demonstrate just how deep mistrust of the Germans has
become.
Open Rupture
For Merkel, the new
plan presented by Turkey was a coup. For the first time, Ankara
agreed to reaccept refugees who had fled across the Aegean to Greece.
In return, the EU would agree to take Syrians from Turkey --
initially in accordance with a complicated formula but ultimately a
fixed quota. In addition, Turkey is to receive an additional €3
billion ($3.35 billion), relaxed visa requirements -- as early as
June, if possible -- and a commitment to accelerating Turkey's long
dormant EU accession negotiations.
It is unclear
whether the plan will ever be implemented. For that to happen, Merkel
needs the confidence of her European partners -- confidence that she
has spent the past several months eroding. French President Holland
only refrained from rejecting the Turkish proposal outright at the
Brussels summit because he wanted to prevent an open rupture with
Merkel.
For France, though,
lifting Turkish visa requirements as early as this summer is out of
the question. "We won't be able to push that through here,"
says one Hollande advisor. Thus far, Turkey has only fulfilled half
of the 72 conditions demanded by Brussels for the lifting of visa
requirements. Ankara, for example, still stubbornly refuses to
recognize passports from Cyprus, which is an EU member state.
Furthermore, only travelers with biometric passports are allowed to
enter the EU without a visa. Turkey, though, has yet to produce
travel documents that fulfill the EU's strict criteria.
Paris is not the
only place where resistance to visa relaxation can be found. "We
cannot exchange a refugee wave for a visa wave," says Andreas
Scheuer, general secretary of the CSU. "Otherwise we'll go from
the frying pan into the fire."
"My fraction is
very skeptical of complete visa freedom for Turkish citizens,"
adds Manfred Weber, head of the conservative European People's Party
group in European Parliament. "There will be no refugee rebate."
The acceleration of
Turkish accession negotiations is even more controversial than the
visa issue. Cyprus is categorically opposed to the opening of
additional negotiation chapters. The northern part of the
Mediterranean island has been occupied by the Turks since 1974, and
they don't recognize the Republic of Cyprus as a sovereign country.
Even aside from that, the approach to Turkey comes at an awkward
moment. On the Friday before the Brussels summit, the Turkish
government raided the editorial offices of the opposition paper Zaman
and took over control.
'We Can't Trust
Turkey'
The core element of
Turkey's proposal is also legally questionable. It would be a
violation of European and international law to simply send migrants
back to Turkey after they had made it across the Aegean.
Asylum-seekers may only be sent back to countries where a fair asylum
hearing is guaranteed. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told
SPIEGEL this week that "we don't yet consider Turkey to be a
safe country of origin nor a safe third country for asylum-seekers."
The solution currently looks to be that of Greece declaring Turkey to
be a safe third country. Then, most refugees could be sent back.
Many of Germany's EU
partners would love to see Merkel fail. They see the border closures
along the Balkan Route as tangible policy results and Merkel's
diplomatic dance with Turkey as delusional. "We can't trust
Turkey," says a source close to Hollande.
Still, one has to
give Merkel credit for her attempt to make Europe more humane. She
believed that if Germany accepted refugees, other countries would be
infected by the generosity bug. Her policy hinged on a belief that
humanitarianism could be contagious. It is a nice idea, and perhaps
not totally absurd. Even if half of the Syrian population had made
its way to Europe, could not the EU's population of 500 million have
handled it?
One significant
problem with Merkel's refugee policy was the timing of the crisis.
When she opened Germany's borders to the refugees trapped in Budapest
last September, she was at the zenith of her power. But in Europe,
her austerity demands had turned many countries against her -- and
here she was imposing her refugee principles, a curious mixture of
Protestant parsonage and German sensibility, on the Continent.
Merkel failed to
realize soon enough just how little Europe was willing to accept. The
price for her policies is not just the rise of a new right-wing
populist party in Germany and a German society that is more divided
and disgruntled than it has been in years. She also created a Europe
that is no longer united.
By Julia Amalia
Heyer, Peter Müller, Ralf Neukirch, Christoph Pauly, René Pfister
and Christoph Schult
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