The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has announced new migrant measures such as prioritising migrants from societies with pro-Western Christian values.
CSU leader and Prime Minister of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, who has been a critic of the Chancellor’s migrant policies and open borders, also proposes allotting a maximum ceiling for migrant numbers, reports Zeit.
On Friday and Saturday, the CSU is scheduled to meet to discuss their new party platform. The policy paper entitled “Germany Should Remain Germany” outlines the measures that the CSU would like to implement to bring the migrant crisis under control.
The party proposes a maximum of 200,000 migrants allowed into Germany per year and says that people from pro-Western Christian societies must have priority over other migrants who may have different values – i.e. when it comes to attitudes towards women or religious freedom.
The document also contains a ban on the full-face Islamic veil and says that the burka is the “uniform of Islamism”.
The proposals are similar to those by the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who want to ban the burka and the building of minarets. The AfD outlined their proposals earlier in the year at their convention in Stuttgart where they were attacked by leftists and slammed by the establishment media.
The new proposals on migration have not gone unnoticed by the AfD who are coming off a huge regional election success in Chancellor Merkel’s home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
AfD Federal Vice Chairman Alexander Gauland said that the paper had some “clever stuff in it” but slammed the CSU saying that if they were serious about implementing the proposals they would have left the coalition with Merkel’s CDU a long time ago.
The CSU paper also touched on the heated issue of visa liberalisation for Turkey making it clear that although the European Union (EU) migrant deal with Turkey depends on visa-free access, the CSU would resist the measure.
Currently neither the EU nor Turkey can agree on proposals to enable visa-free travel which has led to repeated threats from the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has set a deadline for the end of the year for the deal to be settled.
The paper signals the latest thorn in the side of the German coalition, where partners of Chancellor Merkel are further distancing themselves from her migrant policies. Merkel even admitted this week that it was her migrant policy that had led to the huge growth in support for the AfD.
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