German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe is facing a defining moment tackling the largest influx of refugees since World War II as diverging paths for handling the crisis came into focus across the region.
“I’ve rarely held such an innermost conviction that this is a task that will decide whether Europe is accepted as a continent of values,” Merkel said yesterday after talks with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Loefven in Berlin. “On this issue where the whole world’s eyes are upon us, we can’t just say Syria is too far away, we won’t deal with it.”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said earlier in the day that providing 6 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) in added funds for refugees is an “absolute priority.” That contrasted with Istvan Simicsko, named Hungary’s minister of defense on Monday, who said his country would devote more resources to speeding up the fortification of a razor-wire border fence.
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The two countries are indicative of a wider divide within the EU, with Germany among nations calling for greater burden sharing by introducing refugee quotas across the 28-member bloc, and others such as Hungary saying that doing so will simply encourage more migrants to come.
Hungary plans to deploy as many as 4,000 soldiers to complete construction of a sturdier fence on the country’s border with Serbia should parliament approve the measure, Simicsko told reporters in Budapest, calling the situation “extremely grave.”
Germany — which estimates that 800,000 migrants will enter the country this year, nearly four times last year’s figure — is backing a European Commission plan that is to be announced today.
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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is to propose relocating 120,000 migrants in Italy, Greece and Hungary to countries throughout the EU, said an EU official who asked not to be identified as they were discussing plans that are not yet public.
The list of nations deemed free of political persecution to which people can be safely returned will expand to include EU candidate countries in the western Balkans and Turkey, a move meant to speed up the deportation of those unlikely to get asylum, the official said.
“Sweden and Germany are of the opinion that we need binding quotas, binding numbers of refugees who have a right to asylum and who are then fairly distributed across EU member states based on certain principles,” Merkel said. “Unfortunately, we’re far off from that — and therefore we’re of the opinion that something has to change here.”
The UK, Ireland and Denmark will not be included in Juncker’s proposal because they have an opt-out on immigration policy. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who pledged on Monday to take 20,000 refugees over five years, will accept people directly from camps in the Middle East instead of those already in Europe.
Austria, which is expecting as many as 80,000 asylum requests this year, is one of the proponents of a quota system. Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann met Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Czech Premier Bohuslav Sobotka in Bratislava on Monday to discuss the plan, which the eastern European leaders oppose.
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