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Fried – view from Berlin
Nico Fried on the asylum compromise of 1993 – and what we can learn from it today
Nico Fried on what we can learn from the 1993 asylum compromise for today
© Illustration: Sebastian König/Stern; Photo: Henning Kretschmer/Stern
Some would like to see an asylum compromise like 30 years ago. But is 1993 a good example? Only if you avoid the mistakes from back then, that is star-Columnist Nico Fried.
Just like in 1993 – you often hear that now in the discussion about refugee policy. We should do it again like we did back then, I think Carsten Linnemann, the CDU general secretary; says Christian Lindner, the FDP chairman. And Friedrich Merz is also for it, preferably without the Greens. That’s how it was back then.
You can use 1993 as a model for a cross-party agreement – but only if you avoid the mistakes that came with it. Because the asylum compromise back then was a national solo effort, a farewell to European solidarity that would later take revenge.
Solidarity? None
It happened in Helmut Kohl’s eleventh year in office, when the coalition of the Union and the FDP with the opposition SPD passed an amendment to the Basic Law in the Bundestag on May 26, 1993. In 1992 the number of asylum seekers had risen to almost 440,000, many coming from the collapse of Yugoslavia. The municipalities were overloaded. In April, the Republicans in Baden-Württemberg and the DVU in Bremen each entered the state parliaments as the third strongest force. The parallels to today are unmistakable.
The coalition and opposition severely restricted Article 16 (“Politically persecuted persons enjoy the right to asylum”). The safe country of origin was invented in which persecution was ruled out as long as the asylum seeker could not prove otherwise. In addition, there was the third country regulation, according to which the right to asylum had almost been forfeited if anyone entered from a safe neighboring country. Anyone who wants to use Article 16a, which was established at the time, needs to know that there isn’t much left anyway.
At the time, the Pro Asyl organization criticized the fact that “a new wall was being built around Germany.” The Greens said the new regulation was as effective as a shoot order, albeit more elegant. At that time, Wolfgang Schäuble was asked whether only wealthy refugees with a plane ticket to Frankfurt and a suitcase full of evidence could seek asylum in Germany. The Union parliamentary group leader at the time replied: “You can present it like this.” But his concern is not that “we will soon no longer have any asylum seekers.” Schäuble was right.
At first, however, the numbers fell significantly – those of refugees, including those of right-wing extremist parties. The new German asylum law, together with the European Dublin Agreement, meant that Germany was out of the loop because it pushed its refugee problem onto other states. Solidarity? Distribution in the EU? No thanks. That went well until countries like Italy and Greece could no longer withstand the pressure of ever new waves of refugees – and no longer wanted to.
Lessons from the past
For too long people had acted as if there were no more refugees just because they were no longer coming to Germany. Now they were coming back. It was Angela Merkel who was honest enough to admit the German lie. The Chancellor admitted in September 2016 that there were difficulties in dealing with the influx, “also because God knows we haven’t done everything right in recent years.” She, too, “for a long time was happy to rely on the Dublin procedure, which – to put it simply – took the problem away from us Germans. That wasn’t good.”
Linnemann, Lindner and Merz should keep this in mind when they go to the table with Olaf Scholz after the state elections: The 1993 compromise also only dealt with symptoms of a problem. But not solved the problem.
Nico Fried looks forward to hearing from you. Send him an email at [email protected]