Conservatives
push Angela Merkel to get tough on security
German
chancellor’s party divided on how to respond to pressure to rethink
the country’s approach to surveillance.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 12/21/16, 9:44 PM CET Updated 12/22/16, 7:43 AM CET
BERLIN —
Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure to get tough on security
in the wake of the Christmas market attack, above all from some of
her own conservatives who increasingly believe it’s time to consign
Germany’s 20th-century hangups about state surveillance to the
dustbin of history.
For all Merkel’s
insistence that Germany must remain “free, together and open,”
there is strong pressure to change the country’s cautious approach
to privacy which stems from memories of authoritarian rule. The
battles will play out in parliament over the coming months, and will
doubtless sharpen the tenor of next year’s election campaign. To
the already contentious debate about Merkel’s open door migration
policy now add a wrenching discussion of how best to protect Germans
from terrorism.
Interior Minister
Thomas de Maizière urged that the German lifestyle should remain
unaffected “no matter what we find out about the backgrounds and
motives of the perpetrators” of the attack that killed 12 people in
Berlin on Monday, but voices of dissent are getting louder.
“We can’t just
go on with our existing laws,” Klaus Bouillon, regional interior
minister for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the state of
Saarland, told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper on Wednesday.
The 69-year-old
politician, one of 16 state interior ministers in Germany, appeared
to be acting as mouthpiece for the party’s conservative wing,
telling Merkel to safeguard the CDU’s traditional image as the
bastion of law and order ahead of next year’s elections, when she
will seek a fourth term.
His small state in
the far West of Germany will be the first of three states to hold
regional elections next year, which will be testers for the national
vote in September.
As news emerged on
Wednesday that the prime suspect was a Tunisian man who had been
denied asylum in Germany, and who was still believed to be on the
run, armed and dangerous, more conservative politicians echoed
Bouillon’s call.
“Even if he didn’t
commit this deed, he’s a prime example of an asylum policy which
knows no consequences beyond a Willkommenskultur [welcoming culture]
— and this needs to change,” said Armin Schuster, a CDU lawmaker,
following a meeting with de Maizière in the Bundestag.
The welcome culture
he was referring to has become shorthand for Merkel’s decision in
the fall of 2015 to temporarily grant safe passage to refugees
stranded in Hungary. Since then, her open-door response to the
European refugee crisis has led to frustration among some Germans,
and helped the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) party climb to 12 percent support in polls, up from 4 percent
in September 2015.
“Many questions
would remain unanswered [even if he was innocent,]” Schuster said,
“Why didn’t we manage for him to leave the country? What about
the crimes he committed? What about the fact that he was in circles
of Islamist radicalizers?”
Hard talk
In private, members
of parliament from Merkel’s CDU called Monday’s atrocity a
turning point.
The party is divided
on how to react: Should the CDU stick to the line defended by Merkel,
who still enjoys high popularity among Germans after she rejected
what she considers populist responses such as implementing an upper
limit to the number of refugees? Or should they imitate the hardline
rhetoric of the AfD to avoid losing votes to the far right?
“It would be wrong
to claim that the refugee crisis and the developments, particularly
during the year 2015, have nothing to do with [Monday’s] deed,”
said Stephan Meyer of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), which
together with the CDU forms the conservative bloc in the Bundestag.
In concrete terms,
he demanded an extension of the maximum time that authorities can
hold asylum seekers pending deportation from 4 days to 14, as well as
calling for legal provision to imprison people who have been denied
asylum, and who have been deemed a threat to public safety.
Merkel’s
government — a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats
(SPD) as junior partners — has made some concessions to the
conservatives on the rules for asylum seekers in a bid to address
growing unease among ordinary Germans about the arrival of hundreds
of thousands of refugees. In the weeks after the decision to let
people in, the government began toughening its tone with asylum
seekers who don’t respect the rules.
Last August,
following four separate violent attacks last summer — three carried
out by asylum seekers and two linked to Islamist terrorism — Thomas
de Maizière announced plans to speed up the deportation of foreign
criminals and boosted the police’s staffing, equipment and
surveillance powers.
As chance would have
it, her government approved legislation on Wednesday to expand video
surveillance in public and commercial spaces — a decision taken
long before Monday’s attacks, as part of the response to the
violent incidents in the summer. Some conservatives had complained
that many such measures had been held up by the opposition in the
Bundesrat, parliament’s upper house.
Free of prejudice
The same people are
now likely to push for more, testing the boundaries of Germany’s
caution about state surveillance and defense of privacy that are
deeply rooted in its experience of authoritarian rule in the 20th
century, under the Nazis and East German communists.
One red line is the
so-called Trennungsgebot (law of separation), which requires police
forces and intelligence agencies to act independently from each
other, in order to avoid any risk of a repetition of the rule by fear
under Adolf Hitler’s security apparatus between 1933 and 1945.
“All our laws have
to do with the fact that we had to come to terms with a history after
World War Two,” Saarland’s Kurt Bouillon told the Rheinische
Post. “This is also the reason for the separation of police and
secret services. This is something we now have to discuss, free of
any prejudice.”
Hardliners in the
CDU and CSU who make such demands can be sure of the support of
Germany’s current security apparatus.
“We urgently need
a political shift in thinking,” Ernst Walter, head of Germany’s
Federal Police Union, told public broadcaster MDR. “It’s absurd
that the new regional government in Berlin [a coalition of the SPD,
Greens and Left party] has demonized video surveillance, but at the
same time asks citizens to provide them with their videos.”
Walter was referring
to the appeal from Berlin police on Tuesday for residents to come
forward with any pictures or video footage that might provide clues
to who carried out Monday’s attack. One day later, the regional
parliament of Berlin said it would not be approving any stepping-up
of video surveillance in the city in response to the Christmas market
attack.
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