German Chancellor Scholz expands border checks to tackle immigration

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition agreed to temporarily extend frontier controls to all nine of Germany’s land borders as part of a crackdown on irregular immigration and an effort to strengthen domestic security.

Germany already has temporary controls on its borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Austria. Those will now be extended for six months from Sept. 16 to include Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg, the interior ministry said Monday in a statement in Berlin.

The move means that police can establish stationary and mobile checks and also have the power to turn people away, as long as their actions are in line with European and German law, the ministry added.

“This serves to protect against the dangers of Islamist terror and serious cross-border crime,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser was quoted as saying in the statement.

“It will continue to be very important to us to act in close coordination with our neighbors and to keep the impact on commuters and everyday life in the border regions as low as possible,” she said, adding that the government had notified the European Commission of the new controls.

Opinion polls show that frustration with the government’s immigration and asylum policies was a key reason why parties of the extreme right and left performed strongly in two regional elections in eastern Germany this month.

The far-right Alternative for Germany, of AfD, came first in the ballot in Thuringia and second in neighboring Saxony but almost certainly won’t be part of any governing coalition as all other parties refuse to work with it.

The Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht — a new party of the extreme left which also wants to curb the influx of migrants — got a bigger share of the vote than both Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens. The other party in the ruling alliance in Berlin, the Free Democrats, barely registered in either region.

The AfD and Wagenknecht’s party, known by its acronym BSW, are expected to do well again in another regional vote on Sept. 22 in the eastern state of Brandenburg, where Scholz has his Potsdam constituency.

An already heated debate around immigration was stoked by the death of three people in a knife attack in the city of Solingen last month — just over a week before the Thuringia and Saxony votes.

A Syrian man who had avoided deportation after a failed asylum application is in custody accused of both the killings, in which a further eight people were injured, and membership of a terrorist organization.

In an effort to counter the rise of extreme political forces, Scholz and officials in his government, as well as members of the main opposition conservatives, have toughened their rhetoric on immigration in recent months.

In June, after a spate of violent attacks, Scholz said Germany would send migrants who commit serious crimes back to their homelands, including Afghanistan and Syria. Following the Solingen attack, he pledged to tighten weapons regulations and accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers.

On a national basis, combined backing for Scholz’s party and his two partners has plunged to record lows with just over a year to go before the next scheduled general election.

The conservative CDU/CSU alliance leads on around 32%, with the AfD second on about 17%. Scholz’s SPD has about 15%, the Greens 11% and the FDP 5%, which is also the threshold for getting into parliament.

Faeser has invited CDU/CSU lawmakers and regional officials for additional talks on immigration policy on Tuesday.