‘Germany must favour Christian migrants’

Berlin / AFP

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Bavarian allies have called for tougher immigration rules in Germany that favour migrants from Europe’s “Christian-occidental cultural sphere”, according to a party paper seen by AFP on Thursday.
The CSU party also has demanded a ban on the Muslim full-face and partial-face veils, an end to dual citizenship, iron-clad rules that newcomers socially integrate and learn German and an upper limit of 200,000 asylum seekers a year.
The party—which has long and fervently attacked Merkel’s liberal stance on refugees that welcomed a million asylum seekers into the EU’s top economy last year—plans to present the paper at a meeting starting on Friday.
The move comes days after the right-wing populist and anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) beat Merkel’s party in a state vote, and about a year before Germany expects to hold national elections.
Merkel, whose long-stellar approval ratings have taken a dive amid the refugee crisis, on Wednesday warned all political parties against a race to the bottom where they adopt the xenophobic rhetoric of the anti-Islam AfD.
But her coalition allies the CSU, based in the deeply conservative and mainly Catholic southern Bavaria region, did not pull their punches in the five-page paper. “Germany must stay Germany,” declared the paper. “We are against our welcoming country being changed through migration and waves of refugees.”
A mass influx like the one seen a year ago, when tens of thousands of refugees a day entered Germany through Bavaria, “must under no circumstances be repeated,” it argued.
From now, demanded the CSU, Germany must set an upper limit of accepting 200,000 refugees a year and otherwise give preference to migrants “from our Christian-occidental cultural sphere”. It added that “a state must decide by itself whom it accepts—it’s not the migrants who
decide”.
It also wants to ban the full-face covering burqa, calling it “a uniform of Islamism, a huge barrier to integration and a symbol of the repression of women that is unacceptable in our
culture”.