Ding ding! It’s not just in Westminster that the debate over illegal migration has got politicians tearing chunks out of each other. Over in Berlin, an emotional Olaf Scholz got up in front of the Bundestag to give his opponents a piece of his mind.
The Chancellor’s speech was meant to be about the budget, but soon veered off track onto migration. In front of a room of rowdy, heckling parliamentarians, the Chancellor attacked the CDU leader of the opposition, Friedrich Merz:
‘You are the type of politician who believes that he has solved the migration issue simply with an interview in Bild am Sonntag. That’s not how it works in reality!’ Scholz shouted. ‘When you are one of those politicians who has barely left the newspaper’s offices before forgetting what it is that you have proposed, because you never had any intention to deal with the problem – that is bad politics!’
Ouch!
Scholz’s rant happened a day after he held talks between his traffic light coalition government and Merz’s CDU to try and agree on how to proceed with Germany’s border crackdown and whether turning away migrants and asylum seekers before they arrived on German soil was possible.
The talks collapsed in spectacular fashion, sparking a fresh round of finger-pointing over who was to blame. The Green party accused the CDU of torpedoing every proposal put forward. The CDU wants a ‘comprehensive rejection’ of migrants at Germany’s borders, but has failed so far to put forward a realistic legal route to doing so. Merz, meanwhile, took to Twitter to lambast Scholz’s government: ‘The traffic light coalition is capitulating to the challenge of irregular migration.’
Something tells Mr S this fight will rumble on for a while yet…
Watch the full clip here:
#Scholz Richtung #Merz. "Sie sind der Typ von Politiker der glaubt mit einem Interview in der Bild am Sonntag hätte er schon die Migrationsfrage gelöst."
— Frank Wigger (@wiggerfr) September 11, 2024
🔥 pic.twitter.com/UFij1GrYoy
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