BERLIN: Angela Merkel’s successor as head of Germany’s conservative CDU party has called for migration policies that do not undermine European unity at the start of a series of meetings to reassess the outgoing chancellor’s approach to migration.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who succeeded Merkel at the helm of the CDU after a knife-edge victory in a party vote in December, is conducting four workshops on Monday with around 100 practitioners in the fields of migration, integration and security.
The policy suggestions that come out of the workshops will later be presented to the federal government and the Bundestag. Merkel will not attend to enable an open discussion, organizers said. Kramp-Karrenbauer said late on Sunday that future migration policies would have to perform a balancing act between the national interest and the interests of the European Union because “a strong and functional Europe [provides] a protective cloak that we need.”
“Everything we do in a national context has immediate repercussions in other European states,” she said.
Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in 2015 caused a crisis for the CDU’s conservative alliance with the Bavarian CSU, bringing the governing coalition to the brink of collapse and contributing to her exit as party leader. — dpa
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