The Empire (Angela Merkel) strikes back at Austria's Chancellor Babyface

The EU countries are going through their own version of coming up with non-solutions to not-really-problems of immigration.

The latest round was a compromise on Tuesday between German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU). Which seems to have resolved a power struggle between the two. (Angela Merkel's last-ditch migrant compromise under scrutiny Deutsche Welle 03.07.2018) At least for this week. Wolfgang Munchau suggests that Merkel's trademark extend-and-pretend solutions are having "rapidly declining half-life."

My FT column on the rapidly declining half-life of Angela Merkel’s fudges. https://t.co/xJ4lD5hfT9

— Wolfgang Munchau (@EuroBriefing) July 3, 2018

The EU's immigration crisis is real, in my view. It's a long-term problem since at least 2011 that will not go away any time soon. People fleeing war and civil violence and desperate conditions in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. There was a crisis moment in 2015, when a big surge of refugees headed north, most of which Germany absorbed.

The current EU solution - arguably the only one in place - is that Turkey, Italy, and Greece are holding large numbers of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East in camps of varying quality. Under the "Dublin" rules governing EU immigration, the EU country of first entry is responsible for processing asylum applications. So the burdens really are unfairly distributed to Greece and Italy, and other EU countries have not been forthcoming, to put it mildly, in accepting refugees that initially enter the EU through other countries.

But for the EU as a whole, the crisis is a longer one, and 2015 was an unusual event in terms of the suddenness of the influx for much larger numbers of refugees. In countries like Germany and Austria, the influx of asylum-seekers has declined year by year since the drastic high of 2015 and can't reasonably be said to be serious problems for either of those two countries in 2018.

But rightwing demagogues have made hay with the issue through anti-immigrant agitation.

While the long-term immigration crisis is a distinct issue itself, in the EU it is intimately connected with the ongoing euro crisis, which is currently in a dormant stage but can break out against at almost any moment. Joe Stiglitz gives a good description of the interconnection in How to exit the eurozone 07/02/2018:

The resulting schisms [in the EU over the euro crisis] have also made it harder to solve other problems, most notably the migration crisis, where European rules impose an unfair burden on the frontline countries receiving migrants, such as Greece and Italy. These also just so happen to be the debtor countries, already plagued with economic difficulties. No wonder there is a rebellion.

In the current situation, Italy is in a particularly volatile moment because it's a country where the immigration and eurozone crises intersect in a particularly visible way.

Ruth Wodak of the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right describes several factors on which people need to focus if we want to have a realistic picture of the current immigration issue in Europe in her The Revival of Numbers and Lists in Radical Right Politics 06/30/2018.

The German compromise on Tuesday was mainly a cosmetic one for (at the moment) a non-problem. Leading up to it, Austria's 31-year-old Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz meddled in an unusual way in German internal politics. He very publicly supported Seehofer in his power play against Merkel. The provocative nature of this is compounded by the fact that Merkel's party (CDU) and Seehofer's party (CSU) are international "sister" parties of Kurz's Christian Democratic People's Party (ÖVP). And Babyface started on July 1 as the President of the Council of Europe the European Union, a position that rotates to different EU countries every six months.

I'm very critical of Angela Merkel in many ways. But she is one of the most accomplished politicians of my lifetime. And she knows how to shove the (political) knife. So I expected retaliation on her part. And part of it has begun. The Merkel-Seehofer deal said Germany wouldn't accept new asylum-seekers entering from neighboring countries. This is to be handled by bilateral deals. And other countries like Czechia or Poland who doesn't want to accept their return will be sent to Austria under a bilateral agreement with them. An agreement that, uh, doesn't yet exist.

After weeks of conflict between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, conservative sister parties CDU and CSU reached a deal last night.

What did they agree to? Here's a summary: pic.twitter.com/zv2ldcpeyX

— DW | Politics (@dw_politics) July 3, 2018

This is the visible beginning of Angie's payback to Babyface. It won't be the last. She's telling him, hey, you want "closed borders" to Austria, fine. We'll close the German border and any people we get we don't want, we'll dump them back onto you, you silly whining twat.

One of the key points in the migration deal between Germany's conservatives is that asylum seekers will be rejected at the German-Austrian border if they are registered in another EU country.

How did Vienna respond to the CDU/CSU agreement? pic.twitter.com/t30KirQmrB

— DW | Politics (@dw_politics) July 3, 2018

If you take a political shot like this at Angie, you'd better makes sure it hits its mark. Otherwise, there will be repercussions.

This is mostly Kabuki theater at the moment. Because there aren't hordes of scary immigrants pouring over the border into Germany. Or Austria either.

The even the Kabuki illustrates some of the limits of trying to operate in an international movement of nationalists.

Stay tuned. There will be more. It's unlikely that Babyface will fare any better in the next rounds.

[Minor updates included]

Xenophobic theater - that does real harm to real people

Xenophobia sometimes makes good political theater for rightwing, authoritarian politicians and leaders. That's not to say that center-left and labor parties don't sometimes indulge it, as well. But it works particularly well for authoritarian parties.

We're certainly seeing that right now with Trump's policy of kidnapping children of immigrants at the Mexican border and putting them in makeshift prison camps. This report on flight attendants' reactions to serving on planes acting as the transport to the child prison camps is revealing, Anonymous Flight Attendant On Child Prison Plane Tells All The Young Turks 06/19/2018:

Trump is implementing a solution to what is in many ways a non-problem. Net immigration from Mexico has recently been negative, i.e., more Mexicans return to their country each year than those that move to the US. The American economy in many ways is currently dependent on undocumented workers, particularly agriculture but by no means only that sector. Trump's repeated claims that Mexican immigrants are rapists, murderers, and MS-13 gang members are just not true.

The children coming across the US-Mexican border are certainly not a significant threat to Americans. Even taking into account that some of them may end up in gangs, particularly if their opportunities to integrate into American society are restricted even more.

But dehumanizing immigrant children is a typical xenophobes' propaganda pitch. In Europe, the image of kindergarten kids wearing a hijab (Muslim head covering) is used by the far right and anti-immigrant politicians in Germany and Austria. It's a way of taking innocent or positive images - a headscarf can keep your head warm and dry in the winter, a kindergarten-age girl for most people is an image of someone who needs affected and be protected from harm - are transformed into a scary threat to Western white Christian civilization and a menace of terrorism in the form of a five-year-old girl in a hijab. Which is about as much of a non-problem as it can be. Because not only is a small girl no immediate threat to an adult man or woman in any remotely normal circumstance. But even devout, conservative Muslim families require their kindergarten-age children to wear hijabs.

The American term "anchor baby" serves a very similar function. Anchors keep your boat safe and stable, and babies are harmless and cute. But in the form of "anchor baby," they become a threat of undermining everything dear to white folks who understand themselves as the only Real Americans.

The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz (ÖVP) is currently promoting what he describes as an "axis of the willing" with Germany and Italy to promote anti-immigrant sentiment and policies in Europe. Kurz on Wednesday was meeting with Bavarian Landeshauptmann (Governor) Markus Söder (CSU) in the Upper Austrian capital city of Linz to promote the position of the German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU and one of Söder's predecessors as Bavarian Governor, to turn back asylum-seekers at the German border. This is essentially a non-problem, as well. It just gives Seehofer and Söder a way to demonstrate their hostility to immigrants and promote anti-EU sentiment. Seehofer is also using it in the moment as part of a tricky political game with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Nina Weissensteiner, Kurz und Söder machen im Asylstreit auf enge Spezln statt neutraler Nachbarn Standard 02.06.2018)

Matthew Karnitschnig reports (Angela rises from the ashes Politico EU 06/19/2018):

CSU leader Horst Seehofer, who is also interior minister, agreed to put off enforcing a new rule to turn back refugees at Germany’s borders until after the upcoming European Council summit, in order to give Merkel more time to negotiate with other EU capitals.

It’s a long shot that Merkel will actually succeed in securing a sweeping deal over the next two weeks to return refugees who show up at Germany’s border from Italy or Greece. Whether the CSU is ready for another face-off with Merkel is another matter.

Meanwhile, Kurz' far-right Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister HC Strache was down visiting with his comrade in the (informal) Nationalist International, new Italian Vice-Premier and Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the far-right anti-immigrant League party. Salvini attracted favorable attention from xenophobes in his brief time in office by refusing to allow rescue ships carrying refugees from Africa to land in Italy, defying international law. Salvini declared himself and Strache to be "friends and allies in defending our peoples." Defending them, that is from taking refugees rescued from drowning int he Mediterranean Sea. (Vizekanzler Strache bei Vizepremier Salvini in Rom Salzburger Nachrichten 20.06.2018)

Salvini was also thereby "solving" a non-problem. Europe does face a continuing long-term crisis in emigration from the Mideast, Afghanistan, and North Africa, not incidentally places where the United States has been fighting wars for the last two decades, more-or-less. A surge in refugees in 2015 set off a political panic that has not yet ended, although immigration declined drastically the following two years and is significantly down even in Italy from 2018. "Despite recent immigration data from the Italian interior ministry showing a 76 percent drop in arrivals in the first few months of the year, the country’s new allies [Austria and Hungary] have migration [sic] as a prime-mover in common, though they differ significantly over what to do about it." (Jacopo Barigazzi, How Italy plans to blow up Brussels Politico EU 06/18/18)

But real harm to real people and real institutions can come from this kind of nationalist demagoguery. Salvini has also announced his taking moves to more closely monitor Roma (Eric J. Lyman, Italy's interior minister wants census for Roma; critics call controversy 'racist' USA TODAY 06/19/2018) in Italy and expel some of them.

Economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis tweets:

Salvini's facist moment is building momentum. After targeting refugees and the Roma Italian community, he is now promising "a mass cleansing, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood". Time for all democrats to call him out as that which he is: a fascist on a rampage

— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) June 20, 2018

Correction 07/15/2018: The Foreign Minister of Austria in the Kurz government from 12/18/2017 to now has been Karein Kneissl; Heinz-Christian Strache has not been Foreign Minister. Strache is Vice Chancellor and Minister of the Civil Service and Sport.

Italy and the refugees rescued from the Mediterranean Sea on the Aquarius ship

Italy is still refusing to let the ship Aquarius with refugees rescued from the Mediterranean dock in Italy. (Steve Scherer and Massimiliano Di Giorgio, Italy and France try to patch up migrant row, draw papal rebuke Reuters 06/14/2018)

This is the new Italian face on immigration, and a grim, ugly start for the new left/right coalition government of Five Stars and the League. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the League is the public face of the policy. But the new Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is going along with it. And, as reported by Dominik Straub und Irene Brickner in Nach geschlossenen Grenzen nun auch gesperrte Häfen Standard 13.06.2018, the ban on letting the ship with people in distress rescued from the ocean, a illegal position in international law that is the way it is for good reasons, could not have been implemented without the consent of the Five Stars Transportation Minister.

This is not a question of national security at all. It's a very cynical, bad-faith posture by the Italian government seeking to exploit nationalist hatreds as a basic part of its political project. As Reuters notes, "The [Italian Prime Minister and the French President] confirmed a lunch meeting on Friday to discuss 'new initiatives' on immigration, a day after Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini announced an 'axis' with Germany and Austria to fight illegal migration." (my emphasis)

Salvini's talk has to be taken seriously, though like our American xenophobes, we can't assume they have any particular devotion to accuracy in their public claims. Austria does have an anti-immigrant government, a coalition of conservative Christian Democrats and hard-right Putinists, i.e, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), which has a formal "working agreement" with Putin's Russia United party. (Rechtspopulisten und Putin-Partei rücken enger zusammen FAZ 19.12.2016) The FPÖ/Russia United agreement commits them to the "strenthening of friendship and raising the young generation in the spirit of patriotism and joy in labor." Kind of an "Arbeit macht Frei" kind of thing, apparently.

But whatever political "axis" there may be among the Italian League and the Austrian governing parties, both Italy and Austria are EU members and both are still bound by general international law. In Germany, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, a rightwing leader from Bavaria who is from the CSU, one of the parties in Angela Merkel's national coalition, has been playing footsie lately with Austria's Christian Democratic Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz on anti-foreign politics. But, for all of her government's failings on immigration issues - and the general impression in the US that Merkel is very pro-immigration is a mistaken one - she isn't making a "axis" with Italy to drown immigrants in the Mediterranean Sea. The strange courtship between Chancellor Babyface and is actually aimed politically against Merkel.

(Dont' even try to shoehorn the mixing of internal and external policies in the EU into the framwork of the discussion on the Russian meddling in the US elecitons; you'll just give yourself a headache.)

Not to understate what a prick Seehofer is being on the subject. He is claiming that as Interior Minister, he has the authority to turn back refugees at the border, Angela Merkel and international law be damned. (Asylstreit: CSU droht mit Alleingang und Ultimatum ORF 147.06.2018) So far, this looks more like a weird political stunt than an actual move on immigration policy. But I wouldn't want to underestimate the possibility of it turning into something worse.

Immigration and the eurozone are currently the two biggest threats to the future of the EU. Both have been hampered by nationalist posturing by EU countries. Although as the de facto leader of the EU, Germany, and Angela's Merkel's governments in particular, bear the heaviest responsibility for it. I think of the both as chronic crises, both of which hit acute turns in 2015. Both are currently "solved" by classic Merkel extend-and-pretend non-solutions, forcing Greece to become Bangladesh via draconian austerity policies, on the euro front, and by contracting out the solution of the Mediterranean refugee problem to Turkey, Italy, and Greece. Both are highly unstable solutions.

The sad part is that the general shape of realistic solutions are very clear. The eurozone either has to be unwound with a return to national currencies, or change it into an optimal currency area with a common budget, shared public debt obligations, and "transfer union" structures.

With immigration, the broad solution is also clear: stop supporting wars in the Middle East, whether by direct intervention, facilitating American or Russian intervention, or selling arms to belligerent parties; get real about the fact that mass immigration to Europe is for all practical purposes a permanent situation that requires a structured, systematic sharing of burdens, i.e., accepting refugees, including, yes, the richer countries like Germany and Austria; and, systematic development work in North Africa to provide safer conditions and better opportunities there. Did I mention that to stop supporting wars in the Middle East is a critical part of this? Oh, and getting emergency services in shape to handle entirely predictable future surges in immigration.

But the obvious eurozone and refugee solutions aren't being undertaken as they should be, largely because too many political parties and groups and business lobbies like weapons manufacturers in particular find it advantageous to demagogue the issues.

But reality does have a nasty way of catching up with wishful thinking and flat-out denial. Facts do matter, despite being singularly inconvenient for narrow nationalists and xenophobes. Turkey, Italy, or Greece could change the calculation overnight by just sending a bunch of the refugees they are holding to parts northward. That would be irresponsible in itself absent real practical agreements on how to do it. But Hungarian, Austrian, and German politicians would have to respond with more than slogans about "close the borders." Austrian Chancellor Babyface likes to claim credit for "closing the Balkan route," but that's a joke. Angela Merkel's agreement with Turkey is what mitigated the acute phase of the immigration crisis of 2015, not any whizbang diplomacy by Austria.

And there's this fact-based reporting from Straub und Irene Brickner, illustrating how cynical and dishonest it is for the Matteo Salvinis of the world to conjure up phony claims to justify xenophobic cruelty:

Frage: Wie viele Flüchtlinge haben die Mittelmeerstaaten heuer bisher aufgenommen?

Antwort: Italien hat in diesem Jahr bis zum 12. Juni insgesamt 14.441 Bootsflüchtlinge aufgenommen; hinzu kommen die 932 Migranten, die am Mittwoch von der italienischen Küstenwache in Catania an Land gebracht wurden. Insgesamt knapp 80 Prozent weniger als im Vorjahr. Spanien hat im laufenden Jahr bisher 11.308 Flüchtlinge aufgenommen, Griechenland 12.065. Es kann also keine Rede davon sein, dass Italien die ganze Immigration allein schultere. Wahr ist aber, dass die nördlichen Grenzen Italiens – jene nach Frankreich, in die Schweiz, nach Österreich und Slowenien – für Flüchtlinge seit langem faktisch geschlossen sind.

[Question: How many refugees have the Mediterranean states taken on up until now?

Answer: Italy has taken 14,441 boat refugees; that includes 932 migrants who were brought to land by the Italian Coast Guard in Catania on Wednesday. In all, 80% less than in the previous year. In the current year, Spain has accepted 11,308 refugees, Greece 12,1065. So that can be no claim that Italy is shouldering the whole immigration alone. But what is [true], is that the borders north of Italy - that to France, in Switzerland, to Austria and Slovenia - have in fact been closed to refugees for a long time. [my emphasis in italics]

Hannelore Kraft and the road to a new Grand Coalition government in Germany

Steffen Hebestreit looks at one of the more significant moments in the process of the SPD moving toward a Grand Coalition government with German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel's CDU/CSU in Das verwirrende Kraft-Zentrum Frankfurter Rundschau 21.10.2013. That is the question of why Hannelore Kraft, the influential Minister-President (Governor) of the state (or province) of North Rhine-Westphalia NRW from the German initials) flipped from being the most prominent critic of a Grand Coalition to a supporter.

According to his report, he doesn't actually know, though he has his own speculation. She is the head of a red-green (SPD/Green Party) government in NRW, the most populous of the German states. If the national SPD is part of a Grand Coalition headed by Merkel at the national level, it could cause complications for her as the NRW head of government, having to make state-level policies conform to unpopular national policies backed by the national SPD as part of the Grand Coalition. There are important local elections coming up in May in NRW, which could be negatively affected by the SPD's role in the Grand Coalition. And Kraft's current role as the coordinator of the SPD majority in the parliamentary upper house would become somewhat eclipsed under a Grand Coalition.

Around a week ago, Kraft suddenly decided she was okay with a Grand Coalition. Hebestreit speculates that she realized that the alternative to a Grand Coalition would be new elections, in which the SPD would presumably lose more votes.

I'm not sure his speculation represents much more than lazy conventional wisdom that a Grand Coalition is inevitable, a conventional wisdom that fits well in this case with Frau Fritz' needs. In the September election, Merkel's CDU/CSU won the largest plurality. But the three parliamentary parliamentary parties considered left - the SPD, the Greens, abd the Left Party - together won a majority of the votes. If the German public just voted for a left majority just in September, why would a new election be expected to significantly change that result in Merkel's favor?

Though the party winning a plurality normally gets the first shot at building a government, there was a path to forming a left government instead. The SPD never considered it, rejecting any coalition with the Left Party out of hand, both before and after the election. Once the national SPD leadership and Merkel agreed to proceed with Grand Coalition negotiations and talks between the Greens and the CDU/CSU went nowhere, as expected, Kraft may have just decided to go with the flow. She may have gotten particular concessions on policies or appointments or what Americans call "pork barrel" projects, who knows?

Regardless of her motives, she had been seen as the most important anti-Grand Coalition leader in the SPD. With her agreement to it now, that significantly decreases the chances the Party base will vote against approving the coalition deal once it is formalized.

As Majid Sattar suggests in Das Wir entscheidet dann ja noch Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 18.10.2013, during a Grand Coalition the internal tensions are most likely to be generated on the left(-leaning) side by Hannelore Kraft and the SPD base in SPD, and on the left by the famously conservative CSU in Bavarian, led currently by Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer, who recently won a major of the seats for his party in the Bavarian state parliament.

Tags: angela merkel, hannelore kraft, horst seehofer, spd