Top officials in the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives on Saturday warned the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) that failure to stick to agreements on migrants could cause the collapse of the potential new German government.
SPD members, who have the final say on the coalition agreement for Europe’s largest economy, must vote by March 2 in a postal ballot, with results to be made public on March 4.
Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer, who heads Bavaria’s CSU, told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper that new legislation was planned to make it easier to return failed asylum seekers to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, and to set up migrant centers in border areas until asylum applications could be processed.