Migrants protest at Greece-Macedonia border as bottleneck builds

Television pictures of migrants desperate to make their way into western Europe via the Balkans show the urgency of a European Union summit next Monday in tackling the bloc’s migrant crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday.

She said she is working toward reducing the number of migrants coming to Germany and Europe by fighting the causes of migration, by helping migrants attain legal status, by fighting human trafficking and by protecting the EU’s external borders.

On March 7th European leaders will meet with their Turkish counterparts to try and hammer out better cooperation on stopping the migrant flow across the Aegean Sea into Greece.

Merkel spelled out her motivation to keep Germany’s borders open without limits on refugees, a goal many in her own country and coalition government openly disagree with. Last week, Austria and several other Balkan countries introduced border restrictions, stranding many people in Greece following a migration summit in Vienna which Germany or Greece were not asked to be involved in.

Televised scenes of migrants being tear-gassed by Macedonian police at the Greek border are underscoring the humanitarian crisis as the rush to close borders bottles up refugees on the EU’s southeastern frontier.

Ms. Merkel told German public broadcaster ARD in an interview: “Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the eurozone – and we were the strictest – can one year later allow Greece to, in a way, plunge into chaos?”

“The more we realize that the European solution is not moving forward, the more we have to rely on national measures”, said Seehofer, who is also premier of Bavaria, the state the vast majority of refugees use as their gateway into Germany. While 59 percent of Germans say they are unhappy with Merkel’s open-door policy, backing for her work as chancellor more broadly rose to 54 percent in late February from 46 percent at the start of the month, according to the poll for broadcaster ARD.

De Maiziere, who is to visit Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, said many applicants lacked travel documents or gave false names and other personal details, making it more hard to send them back to their countries of origin.

Merkel has promised a “drastic reduction” in the numbers of asylum seekers entering Germany this year after about 1 million refugees arrived in the nation last year mainly fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa. Politicians should also express stronger condemnation against attacks on refugees, some 76 percent said.

The criticism came after finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble labelled Social Democrat proposals for wider social spending on housing and public services to complement the integration of migrants as “pitiful”.

But some Greek officials are privately skeptical about whether Ms. Merkel can deliver on her Greece-friendly rhetoric.

She has warned about the consequences for Europe of border closures.

Pointing to the high cost of integrating migrants, Weil said: “We can not create the impression that this is happening at the expense of the weaker members of our society”.