German borders to be tightened immediately by incoming minister
"The first decisions will be made after taking office this Wednesday. This will include ramping up border controls and increasing rejections," Dobrindt of the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union (CSU) told Sunday's edition of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper.
There will be no border closures, the conservative politician said.
"The numbers of illegal migration must come down. To achieve both humanity and order, control, clarity and consistency are needed. We are preparing national and European decisions for this," Dobrindt further stated.
Observers expect that at least temporarily, more federal police officers will be sent to the border. However, what else might change remains unclear.
The German Police Union (GdP) reacted sceptically to Dobrindt's announcement. The GdP is also in favour of measures to curb irregular migration, said Andreas Rosskopf, chairman of the GdP for Federal Police and Customs. However, a significant increase in the number of police officers at the border cannot be sustained permanently with the current staffing levels, he added.
The union representative also expressed doubts about the announcements from conservative politicians to turn back asylum seekers at Germany's land borders without the consent of neighbouring countries like Poland or Austria. "There must be no ping-pong game with neighbouring countries from Wednesday," warned Rosskopf.
"If we are to turn back asylum seekers, it must be legally secure - and so far, I am missing the answer to that," Rosskopf said.
On Tuesday, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz is to be elected chancellor in the lower house of parliament, or Bundestag.
The new government is made up of Merz's CDU, its sister party the CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD).
The future head of the chancellor's office, Thorsten Frei of the CDU, recently announced stricter border checks from the first day of the new government - albeit with a time limit.
Initially, there were hardly any supporters of fixed border checks in the outgoing centre-left coalition, as these are not permitted in the visa-free Schengen Area of which Germany is a part.
Nevertheless, then interior minister Nancy Faeser of the SPD not only repeatedly extended the checks at the land border with Austria that began in 2015, she also ordered such temporary checks in mid-October 2023 for the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland and notified the European Commission of the move.
Last September, she then decided that such checks should also be in place at the remaining border sections.
Last year, 229,751 people applied for asylum in Germany for the first time. This was about 100,000 fewer initial asylum applications than the previous year.
The main countries of origin currently include Syria, Afghanistan, and Turkey. A major reason for the decline, according to the head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), Hans-Eckhard Sommer, is that Serbia effectively closed the refugee route to Hungary in November 2023. Whether this will remain the case permanently is uncertain, Sommer said in a speech at the end of March.
In the coalition agreement, CDU/CSU and SPD have agreed: "We will carry out rejections at the common borders in coordination with our European neighbours, even in the case of asylum applications."
However, it remains unresolved between the conservative CDU/CSU bloc and the centre-left SPD whether "in coordination" means obtaining the neighbours' consent or merely consulting them.
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As these smaller players like to say, it's about 'solidarity.' Spain's own development agency's four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect. Crisis as catalyst? Of course, not everybody is buying it. Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain's solidarity plan. After all, he's seen foreign funders renege on their promises before. He's seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain's plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can't be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power. Whether Spain's plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking. Countries who receive aid now want 'a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,' he said. 'But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.' Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education. Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox's previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they're targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money's used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as 'simply the fair distribution of wealth.' He's not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid 'a thing of the past' at a meeting with African leaders in February. For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn't think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that's mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity. 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