Financial Times on Thursday reported that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was willing to make a “deal” with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the increasingly political sensitive – for the latter – refugee/migrant issue.
According to FT, such an agreement would make it easier for German authorities to send back third country asylum seekers to the European countries from which they entered the EU.
FT quotes Tsipras as saying he was “…open to a special agreement with Berlin to curtail the ‘secondary movement’ of refugees that arrive at the EU’s southern border but then journey north to Germany. Ms Merkel is under intense pressure from her Bavarian conservative coalition partners to convince governments to speed up return procedures for asylum seekers already registered in other EU countries. They are threatening to break up the coalition if she fails to get results at the end of this month.”
Tsipras is also quoted by the London-based financial daily as saying that “…we don’t care about the fact that maybe we’ll have some returns from Germany if this will help, in order to give the signal to smugglers (that Europe is tackling illegal migration flows).”
Moreover, FT said the leftist Greek premier called the Dublin regulation as “out of life”.
In a subsequent political reaction from Athens, a main opposition New Democracy (ND) spokeswoman noted that Tsipras appears to consider his international contacts as a type of “grand bazaar” for bargaining.
In commenting on the Greek PM’s FT interview, spokeswoman Maria Spyraki said this was also the case in the recently concluded fYRoM “name issue” agreement (Prespes), whereas the leftist-rightist coalition government has shown “very low effectiveness in terms of the refugee/migration issue”.
Finally, she said a ND government with Kyriakos Mitsotakis as prime minister will change the law regarding the granting of asylum.
