Persisting migration impasse in Germany leads to Austrian border protection exercise
The recent European Council meeting has been a key place to find such a solution. The European Council released its conclusions this morning, which Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for budget and human resources and CDU politician, hailed as a “genuine breakthrough” which the CDU will recognise “as a big step in the right direction”. On leaving the summit, Chancellor Merkel agreed that the EU agreeing on a common text was a “good signal” but acknowledged that “we still have a lot of work to do to bridge the different views”.
In light of the internal German debates, Austria undertook a larger scale border patrol training exercise, additionally it was the inaugural outing of a new border police unit ‘Puma’. Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the FPÖ party said the exercises were, “to prepare ourselves for all developments and send a clear signal that there will no longer be a loss of control and free passage like in 2015.” He added, “The reasons for this are the debate about intra-European border closures, triggered by Germany, as well as current developments on the refugee routes in the Balkans.”
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP party said of the apparent moves for harder borders, “I want to cooperate so that it will not come to that. We must ensure that illegal migrants no longer make it to the European Union in the first place, because then we would not need intra-European border controls.”
▻https://www.ecre.org/persisting-migration-impasse-in-germany-leads-to-austrian-border-protection-ex
