Divisions surfaced in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government Wednesday on whether the country which is Europe’s top destination for asylum seekers should take in more refugees.
Merkel ally Volker Kauder, parliamentary leader of Merkel’s conservatives, said that “Germany can welcome significantly more refugees. We can and must be able to afford this act of humanity.”
He said that Middle Eastern countries shelter proportionally far more refugees, telling the top-selling Bild daily that in Kurdish areas, “five million people live with one million refugees”.
However, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere later contradicted him, saying that the burden of housing refugees should be better shared among European nations.
Germany had accepted a total of 105,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq since the start of the Syrian war, compared to some European countries who had taken just hundreds, he said.
“We have nothing to be ashamed of in that regard,” de Maiziere said on ZDF public television.
He spoke out against raising Germany’s contingent of refugees from the Middle East which would serve merely “to assuage the guilty conscience of our European partners”.
“I would advocate a European quota system for refugees from Syria and Iraq. Germany would participate in it.”
Refugee flows to Europe have risen sharply in tandem with conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Africa. Many have headed to Germany, Europe’s top economy and its most populous country with 80 million people.
Last year, asylum requests to Germany rose 60 percent to more than 200,000, leaving many communities scrambling to house the newcomers in old schools, public buildings, mobile homes and army barracks.
The influx spawned the emergence of the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement in the eastern city of Dresden last October, where flag-waving nationalists have railed against “criminal asylum seekers”.
This month a building earmarked to house asylum seekers was set ablaze in the eastern town of Troeglitz in Saxony-Anhalt state, where the mayor recently resigned after being targeted by neo-Nazi protesters.
Another planned refugee centre, near the western city of Duisburg, was defaced with swastikas and anti-foreigner slurs this week.
Several of Germany’s 16 states have demanded more federal funds to meet the costs of handling asylum seekers, but Kauder rejected their request, saying Berlin had already raised payments to cities and states by around one billion euros.
The UN refugee agency said last month that the number of asylum seekers in industrialised countries rose by nearly 50 percent last year, driven by the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
About 866,000 people applied for asylum in wealthy countries in 2014, marking a 22-year high, said the agency, calling it “the worst humanitarian crisis of our era”.
