#it doesn’t even matter that the elections took place a while ago and the populists right wingers don’t rule poland anymore | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

enfinizatics · 2 months

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the polish government is so fucking scared of israel and netanyahu that not only they abstain from voting for the ceasefire during an UN meeting, but even when israel literally targets a humanitarian convoy and kills one of our citizens all they fucking say is: “we don’t understand how this could happen but we will try to find the answers”. how the fuck can you say that when israel has been literally ruthlessly murdering palestinian people for the past 6 months and conducting an ethnic cleansing for 76 years. how can you say this shit when they mostly target civilian infrastructure, hospitals and most recently, refugee camps. how can you be so disgustingly oblivious to everything that’s been happening for the past few months.

not to mention the fact that bombing humanitarian relief is literally one of the tactics used to prevent any kind of help reaching the palestinian people.

the idf has come forward to call bombing the humanitarian aid a mistake but everyone fucking knows that targeting three branded vehicles was intentional, not to mention the fact that the route the volunteers took had been discussed with IDF before they targeted them. because all of that, polish people finally started to realize that it’s the israel who’s a terrorist here. finally the society is asking the right questions and starts advocating for the palestinian people and in return we’re getting accused of antisemitism by an israeli embassy in poland. very fucking frustrating it took the death of a polish white man (damian soból whom i respect very deeply as a human rights lawyer/activist and volunteer myself) for this to happen because there have already been several cases of palestinian-polish people trying to get out of gaza, and they had to wait ages until the polish people started advocating for them and then the government finally got them out. they had to wait because they weren’t white. fuck the polish government that licks israeli boots on a daily basis and fuck israel, a terrorist state that openly commits war crimes. i wish both of them to fucking die tbh.

#this is so messy but i’m so mad that the government won’t call it what it is: a murder #a murder just like every single death of a palestinian citizen #even lied that they would do everything in their power for the humanitarian aid to reach gaza #netanyahu just called it an accident once again. shut the fuck up #people have literally drowned while trying to gather some supplies for their families #kids are being starved TO DEATH #there is that #it doesn’t even matter that the elections took place a while ago and the populists right wingers don’t rule poland anymore #now we’ve got happy liberals who continue to be netanyahu’s bitches and lick israelis boots #dismantle israel #israel is a settler colony #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #free palestine #palestine will never die #humanitarian aid #human rights #polish politics #polska polityka #polska #palestine #world central kitchen #moira speaks

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Secret Identity, our regular column on identity and its role in politics and policy.

In the days after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the two people who seemed like the Democratic Party’s most obvious 2020 candidates, then-Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, hinted that Clinton had gone too far in talking about issues of identity. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman; vote for me,’” Sanders said. Other liberals lamented that the party had lost white voters in such states as Ohio and Iowa who had supported Barack Obama, and they said Democrats needed to dial back the identity talk to win them back.

But that view never took hold among party activists. Liberal-leaning women were emboldened to talk about gender more, not less, after the 2016 election. We’ve had women’s marches and women running for office in greater numbers than ever — all while emphasizing their gender. President Trump’s moves kept identity issues at the forefront, too, and gave Democrats an opportunity both to defend groups they view as disadvantaged and to attack the policies of a president they hate.

The Democratic Party hasn’t simply maintained its liberalism on identity; the party is perhaps further to the left on those issues than it was even one or two years ago. Biden and Sanders are still viable presidential contenders. But in this environment, so is a woman who is the daughter of two immigrants (one from Jamaica and the other from India); who grew up in Oakland, graduated from Howard and rose through the political ranks of the most liberal of liberal bastions, San Francisco; who was just elected to the Senate in 2016 and, in that job, declared that “California represents the future” and pushed Democrats toward a government shutdown last year to defend undocumented immigrants; and who regularly invokes slavery in her stump speech. (“We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are Native American or your people were kidnapped and placed on a slave ship, your people are immigrants.”)

Sen. Kamala Harris has not officially said she is running in 2020, but she hasn’t denied it, either, and she’s showing many of the signs of someone who is preparing for a run, including campaigning for her Democratic colleagues in key races and signing a deal to write a book. The Californian ranks low in polls of the potential Democratic 2020 field, and she doesn’t have the name recognition of other contenders. (Her first name is still widely mispronounced — it’s COM-ma-la.) But betting markets have her near the top, reflecting the view among political insiders that Harris could win the Democratic nomination with a coalition of well-educated whites and blacks, the way Obama did in 2008.

Whatever happens later, the rise of Harris and her viability for 2020 tell us something about American politics right now: We are in the midst of an intense partisan and ideological battle over culture and identity; the Democrats aren’t backing down or moving to the center on these issues; and politicians who want to lead in either party will probably have to take strong, clear stances on matters of gender and race.

An opportunity

Harris, who went from district attorney of San Francisco to attorney general of California, was a heavy favorite in her 2016 Senate race. But once elected, she was expected to become a virtually powerless freshman senator in Hillary Clinton’s Washington. In fact, she might have been only the second most important person in Washington from her family, since her younger sister, Maya, was a top Clinton policy adviser on the campaign and in line for a senior White House job.

But Clinton’s loss created an opportunity for Harris. The Democrats had the normal leadership vacuum of a party without control of the White House but also a specific void of people who were well-versed in immigration issues and were willing to take the leftward stances on them that the party base wanted as Trump tried to push U.S. immigration policy right. Meanwhile, Biden and Sanders were not natural figures to defend Planned Parenthood when, as part of the repeal of Obamacare, the GOP sought to bar patients from using federal funds at the nonprofit’s clinics. African-American activists went from being deeply connected to the White House to basically shut out of it, as Trump had few blacks in his Cabinet or in top administration posts. And, electorally, while Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were obvious potential presidential candidates for the populist wing of the party that backed the Vermont senator in the 2016 Democratic primaries, the coalition of minorities and more establishment-oriented Democrats1 who had backed Clinton didn’t necessarily have an obvious standard-bearer, particularly with the uncertainty over Biden’s status as a candidate in 2020.

While veteran party leaders like Biden may have wanted the party to move to the center on identity issues, Democratic voters had moved decidedly to the left, a process that was happening under Obama but may be accelerating under Trump. For example, a rising number of Democrats say that racial discrimination is the main factor holding blacks back in American society, that immigration is good for America and that the country would be better off if more women were in office.

“The Democrats are the party of racial diversity, of gender equality — and there’s no going back from that,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the think tank New America, who has written extensively about the growing cultural divide between the parties.

Harris has seized the opportunity. From attending the annual civil rights march in Selma to pushing legislation that would get rid of bail systems that rely on people putting up cash to be released from jail, she has seemed to try to lead on issues that disproportionately affect black Americans and to position herself as their potential presidential candidate. She was one of the earliest critics on Capitol Hill of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, and her push for a government shutdown over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program delighted party activists (even if the strategy ultimately failed). Harris was among the first Senate Democrats to call for Minnesota’s Al Franken to resign amid allegations that he groped several women, and she has been a strong defender of Planned Parenthood.

A different moment

You might be thinking, “Didn’t we just have a biracial person (who was often described as and embraced being a ‘black’ politician) who was fairly liberal on cultural issues as a major national political figure? Wasn’t he president of the United States?”

Well, yes. But here’s the big difference: Obama didn’t emerge as a presidential candidate by highlighting his strong stands on these divisive, complicated cultural issues, as Harris is attempting to do. In fact, his rise was in large part because he implied that America was not as divided on those issues as it seemed — and that those divides were diminishing. The 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that launched him to the national stage seems, now that we are in the Trump era, almost crazily optimistic. (“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” he said back then. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”)

Whatever the reality of such statements, the political strategy behind them made sense: It’s hard to imagine that America a decade ago would have embraced a nonwhite politician who wasn’t downplaying cultural divides and emphasizing unity. Back then, someone regularly talking about his or her ancestors being kidnapped and enslaved probably had no chance at being elected president.

But 2018 is much different than 2004 or 2008 in terms of the national debate on identity issues. For example, compared with a decade ago, a much higher percentage of Americans, particularly Democrats, see racism as a major problem. Over the past decade, Americans went through the birther movement, shootings of African-Americans by police captured on video, Black Lives Matter protests, Trump’s racial and at times racist rhetoric and Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark. And it’s not just race — think about #MeToo, the legalization of gay marriage and new debates on the rights of people who are transgender.

Harris can’t take the Obama “Kumbaya” route to the White House — I’m not sure at this point that a white Democrat could, either. By the end of his term, Obama didn’t sound particularly hopeful about America getting beyond its cultural divides. Clinton spoke more directly about race and racism in 2016 compared with Obama in 2004 and 2008. Sanders and other white Democrats are already talking taking fairly liberal stances on these issues, and I expect that to continue into next year.

I’m not sure Harris had much choice anyway. She is a Democratic senator from heavily Latino California with Trump as president, so it’s a virtual job requirement for to her to take leftward stances on immigration issues. She is a minority woman at a time when minorities and women are trying to gain more power in national politics, particularly within the Democratic Party — and she is the only black female senator. In other words, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are, of course, different people. But they also arrived on the national scene at much different political moments.

“When you speak truth, it can make people quite uncomfortable,” Harris told a group of Democratic activists earlier this year in a speech in Henderson, Nevada. “And for people like us who would like to leave the room with everyone feeling lovely, there’s sometimes a disincentive to speak truth.

“But this is a moment in time in which we must speak truth.”

This is a bit longer than our normal Secret Identity column, so let’s skip “What else you should read.” But please contact me at [email protected] for your thoughts on this piece or ideas for upcoming ones.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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newstfionline · 5 years

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The new autocrats

Griff Witte, Washington Post, Dec. 7, 2018

WROCLAW, POLAND--The police came in the pre-dawn stillness of a freezing February morning in southwestern Poland, knocking at the door of a national hero who had once again become a wanted man.

There was a time when Wladyslaw Frasyniuk would have run. As the daring and profane bad boy of Solidarity, Poland’s underground pro-democracy movement, he had lived as a fugitive from the smothering grip of the communist state security services, jumping from trains, fleeing along rooftops and speeding away on motorcycles.

But that was long ago. Back before the authoritarian regime he was fighting came crashing down, unleashing a new era of freedom in 1989. Before a 2015 election yielded a government determined to use the liberties and powers of a modern democratic state to snuff out independent institutions. Before Frasyniuk came to realize that history doesn’t travel in only one direction.

“Everything that my generation accomplished,” said Frasyniuk, a revolutionary in his 20s who has become a dissident once more in his 60s, “has made it easier and easier for this government to consolidate its control.”

Autocracy is making a comeback, seeping into parts of the world where it once appeared to have been vanquished.

But it is a sleeker, subtler and, ultimately, more sophisticated version than its authoritarian forebears, twisting democratic structures and principles into tools of oppression and state control. It is also, quite possibly, far more potent and enduring than autocracies of old.

After decades of steady expansion of rights and liberties, the pro-democracy watchdog Freedom House has recorded sharp reversals, with the share of nations dubbed “free” declining since 2007. Countries in every region of the world have suffered setbacks, in areas such as free and fair elections, the independence of the press, the rights of minorities and the rule of law.

As Americans worry about the health of their own democracy, the lesson from abroad is that the decline can come bracingly fast.

It has in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that, three decades ago, was at the vanguard of the last great act of the 20th century: the triumph of liberal democracy over dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain. Led by young activists like Frasyniuk, Poland and its neighbors ushered in the supposed end of history.

Today, the region is on the front lines of history’s march in reverse. The democratic society that Frasyniuk fought for is in retreat, while a new breed of autocrat advances.

“It’s not autocracy. It’s neo-autocracy,” said Cristian Parvulescu, dean of the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania, a country that critics fear is trending away from the rule of law. “It’s not democracy. It’s post-democracy.”

Some governments in the region, such as Hungary’s, are deep down the road toward indefinite one-party rule. Leaders in other countries, such as the Czech Republic, only seem to aspire to that sort of absolute authority.

But wherever signs of autocracy are emerging, this much is true: They bear little resemblance to the obviously repressive methods so familiar from school textbooks chronicling 20th-century despotism.

There are no strutting soldiers in the streets or cults of personality around the great leader. Opponents and journalists speak openly and loudly, generally without fear of persecution. Instead of building walls to keep their own people in, governments construct tech-laden fences to keep supposed enemies out. Instead of economic isolation and scarcity, a gusher of foreign investment flows.

And yet, ruling politicians and parties have managed to consolidate power to a degree not seen since the communist era. Supposedly independent institutions--including courts and prosecutor’s offices--have become instruments of political control. Newspapers and television stations are bought up by friendly business executives and dutifully preach the government’s line. Elections still take place, but they are used as justification for the majority to impose its will rather than a chance for the minority to have its say.

“In every respect, it looks like Europe. But you don’t actually have the freedoms that makes Europe what it is,” said Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian human rights scholar and president of the Budapest-based Central European University (CEU). “It’s new political technology.”

His university has been a victim of that innovation.

Deemed a political enemy because it was founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, the highly regarded institution has been a top target of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He has denounced CEU in speeches, and his government has passed legislation designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the American-accredited school to operate.

But in keeping with the new style, Orban avoided shutting down the university outright--and the storm of condemnation that would come with such a move. Instead, he left CEU dangling in limbo for nearly two years and gave himself a small measure of deniability when it opted to retreat into exile this month. The U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David B. Cornstein, used that ambiguity to blame Soros, not Orban, for the exit.

Orban, considered the architect of the region’s new autocratic model, has boasted of his desire to replace outmoded notions of liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy.”

Others who stand accused of turning their countries away from basic freedoms deny the charge and insist that, in 21st-century Europe, it can’t even be done.

“There’s a principle of irreversibility. Once you reach a certain standard of democracy and human rights, you can’t go back,” Romanian Justice Minister Tudorel Toader said.

He spoke in an interview in his office across the street from the “People’s House,” a 1980s-era marble monument to dictatorial megalomania--and now the seat of Romania’s parliament.

Toader this year forced the firing of a crusading anti-corruption prosecutor who was investigating top government officials. He has also helped push through legislation that independent authorities have said will severely limit the power of other prosecutors to hold the powerful to account.

But autocracy? Hardly, he says.

“People have the freedom to choose where to travel, where to live, where to work. These are things that people didn’t even dare to dream about under communism,” said the former law professor who is now seen by critics as an archenemy of the rule of law. “A Romanian can take a plane and go see the Statue of Liberty. You can’t turn him backwards.”

That is what worries Frasyniuk.

He served four years in a communist prison--and endured frequent beatings from guards--because he wanted his Polish countrymen to know the freedoms of democracy.

But in the past three years, ever since the right-wing Law and Justice party won elections, he has watched the government use the liberties for which he fought to tighten its grip.

The election victory became a pretext for the takeover of previously independent institutions. The country’s membership in the European Union was transformed into a shield against charges of oppression and a foil in Poland’s long-standing quest for sovereignty. Its integration into the global economy--and the fast-paced growth that has come with it--put money in people’s pockets, overriding more abstract concerns about the rule of law.

Frasyniuk became a successful businessman after communism’s fall. But Law and Justice’s rise brought him back to the streets.

An anti-government protest in June of 2017 led to a brief scuffle with police and an investigation with which he refused to cooperate. That was enough to draw officers to his door in February--though the tactics were less conspicuously brute-force than in the old days.

“Authorities used to treat people like me in a serious manner,” Frasyniuk said, a note of wistful disgust in his voice, his mischievous blue eyes gleaming. “They broke down doors and threw you to the ground.”

If the style was new, the outcome that cold day was familiar. Frasyniuk was handcuffed behind his back and led away, a throwback to a time when he had “golden miles membership” at his local police precinct.

“I’m proof,” he said, “that you can get a complete historical cycle in one lifetime.”

Still fit but graying at age 64, he is again on the front lines of a freedom struggle.

But this time, the blind courage of youth is gone. He knows the advantage lies with the autocrats.

Just about every day this year, Malgorzata Gersdorf has put on a power suit and shown up at Poland’s Supreme Court, a modern glass building framed by faux-copper columns, etched with the scales of justice, in Warsaw. Her fellow judges recognize her as the court’s leader. She works in the chief justice’s chambers.

But the government declared her retired in July.

“It’s a difference of interpretation,” Gersdorf said matter-of-factly this fall during an interview in her office, where a fine old grandfather clock ticks away. “Mine is based on the constitution.”

The Polish word for it--Konstytucja--dangles from her necklace in cubed black and white letters, like a shield.

But she doubts its ability to protect her.

The right-wing, populist Law and Justice party has followed a path to remake the Polish courts, arguing that the last vestiges of the communist era need to be purged--even though holdover judges have already gone through a rigorous screening process.

Soon after winning the 2015 elections, the party effectively took over the Constitutional Tribunal, packing the court with friendly judges. Then it moved on to the National Council of the Judiciary, giving itself final say over a body that, as Poland’s arbiter of judicial independence, had been relatively free of political influence.

Finally, it took aim at the Supreme Court.

Constitutionally, Gersdorf’s term as chief justice runs until 2020. But the government has tried to force her and dozens of Supreme Court colleagues into early retirement. It has sought to replace them--and to fill dozens of newly created seats--in a process that has been boycotted by nearly all of the nation’s judges and denounced by European authorities.

“It’s all been completely different than what you teach your students about what law is,” said Gersdorf, a professor before she became a judge. “At first, we got so dizzy, we all got sick.

“Now we’re used to it. Now we never say, ‘Well, they can’t do that,’ because, the fact is, they can do anything.”

To Law and Justice supporters--and others in the region brandishing the will of the people as a weapon--this is how democracy is supposed to work. To the victor go the spoils. And those include control not only of the courts but also the constitution, prosecutor’s offices, public media, intelligence services, the civil service and other supposedly independent constraints on executive power. Hungary’s government has even cracked down on civil society organizations with the justification that NGOs helping refugees were never elected to anything.

In this view, defenders of judges or bureaucrats or nonprofits are blocking the majority’s desires and using seemingly principled stands to mask their grievance at having been bested at the polls.

“Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose,” said Malgorzata Zuk, a party activist and Warsaw lawmaker. “Sadly, there are some people who will never accept the results.”

But to Gersdorf, it is a perversion of democracy--a deliberate misinterpretation of the checks on political power and the ultimate authority of the constitution.

“It’s a very dangerous direction,” she said, one that ultimately leads to “the destruction of the Polish justice system.”

The government didn’t try to stop her from showing up to work, knowing, perhaps, that to do so would provoke a clash. But with protests dwindling and options for halting the government’s takeover seemingly at their end, Gersdorf had all but accepted she would soon be ousted.

Then, the unexpected: An October ruling by the European Court of Justice temporarily blocked the forced retirements. Local elections, meanwhile, dealt the ruling party a setback.

Late last month, the government retreated, introducing and passing legislation in a single day that will allow Gersdorf and her colleagues to keep their jobs.

Gersdorf’s hopes have been vindicated--at least for now.

#autocracy #Eastern Europe #Poland #Hungary

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cleopatrarps · 6 years

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Angela Merkel Seemed to Get a Reprieve Over Migrants. It Didn’t Last.

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany thought she had fended off a mutiny within her own conservative alliance after returning from marathon talks with fellow European leaders on Friday with an agreement on how to handle migration.

But instead, the rebellion escalated late on Sunday, further weakening Ms. Merkel, who was once seen as a rock of European politics and the guardian of the liberal world order.

In the latest twist, Ms. Merkel’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to resign over the dispute with the chancellor’s migration policy. Talks between the chancellor’s party and Mr. Seehofer’s Christian Social Union party are expected to take place Monday.

If Mr. Seehofer resigns as minister and party leader, but the Christian Socialists remain in the governing coalition, Ms. Merkel’s government will limp on. If he takes his party out of the coalition — a partnership the parties have forged in Parliament since the end of World War II — she loses her majority.

Whatever the outcome, the last two weeks have left the chancellor badly damaged and many Germans wondering how much longer she will last.

They have exposed the spectacular weakening of a leader who not long ago was seen as a key defender of liberal values — a sentiment that culminated in her decision in 2015 to welcome to Germany hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere who were not wanted by neighboring European countries.

Three years later, as nationalism and populism take root in various corners of Europe and Germany itself, observers say Ms. Merkel is a political dead woman walking.

“Merkel was synonymous with the liberal world order,” said Andrea Römmele of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “She was an authority at home and abroad, but that is history.”

“If she doesn’t go down now, she goes down in the next crisis,” Ms. Römmele said.

Over the last nine months, Ms. Merkel has stumbled from one political crisis to another. In the September election, her party saw a significant decline in voter support and a far-right party entered Parliament for the first time in more than 60 years. In November, a first attempt at forming a coalition broke down. Earlier this year, a second attempt hung in the balance for weeks. In the end it took Ms. Merkel nearly six months to form a government.

Three months later, the Bavarian rebellion could undo the fractious coalition after all.

Bavaria, with its 500-mile land border, found itself on the front line of the migrant crisis in 2015. And even though migrant arrivals have slowed sharply since then, the far-right Alternative for Germany party has been making gains.

Ahead of state elections in October, Mr. Seehofer’s conservatives have responded by veering sharply to the right themselves.

A former Bavarian premier with a towering stature and a sharp tongue, the interior minister has been one of Ms. Merkel’s fiercest critics on migration over the past three years and has often sounded more in line with the nativist forces shaping politics in neighboring countries than with his own boss.

A friend of Victor Orban, Hungary’s semi-authoritarian prime minister, he has recently mulled an alliance on migration policy with his far-right counterparts in Austria and Italy.

The latest standoff is over a demand by Mr. Seehofer that Germany turn back at the border migrants who are already registered elsewhere in the European Union, to ensure security in the country.

Ms. Merkel has championed a European solution on the migration issue, warning that unilateral action could endanger freedom of movement within the European Union, a central precept of the 28-member bloc.

It is hard to overstate the scope of German influence over European affairs during the Merkel era. During the financial and debt crises, Germany imposed austerity policies on debtor countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and, especially, Greece. Even as the Obama administration and an array of economists called for looser policies, the Germans held firm.

Beyond economics, Ms. Merkel has been the rock of European foreign policy, demanding a tough line on maintaining economic sanctions against Russia after the conflict in Ukraine while other European countries were far less enthusiastic.

And it has been Ms. Merkel who has pointedly stood up to President Trump, to the cheers of many Europeans and others who have embraced her as a defender of the liberal order.

Yet the political landscape has shifted radically, not only in Germany, but also elsewhere in Europe.

The rise of President Emmanuel Macron in France has marked a rebalancing of power away from Berlin. But France still needs Germany, and a distracted and fragile Ms. Merkel has been unable to be the strong partner Mr. Macron needs.

At a European Union summit meeting in Brussels last week, the chancellor turned to her European partners for help on the issue of migration, winning agreements from more than a dozen nations to take back people registered in their countries and other measures to tighten the bloc’s outer border.

But the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland — all of whom are ruled by nationalist or populist parties that have rejected a common European Union approach to migration, and even calls to take in refugees — raised questions about their willingness to help Germany.

At stake at home is not just the chancellor’s clout and coalition, but her own political survival. Since the end of World War II, her conservative Christian Democratic Union has worked together in Parliament with the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union. If the sister parties were to break, Ms. Merkel could face a vote of confidence, decide to step down, or try to continue a minority coalition with the Social Democrats.

Mr. Seehofer and the chancellor met for hours deep into the night on Saturday before the leadership of each party convened separately on Sunday to discuss the matter among themselves.

Heading into Sunday’s talks, the chancellor had sounded confident that the measures she secured in Brussels were sufficient to meet Mr. Seehofer’s demands for increased security for Germany.

“I share the C.S.U.’s aim of on the one hand reducing the number of immigrants being brought to Europe by smugglers, and on the other hand I also share the view that asylum seekers can’t simply choose which country they want to go to,” Ms. Merkel told the public broadcaster ZDF before the talks began.

The issue has consequences beyond Germany’s borders. Austria’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, said that if Mr. Seehofer were to order refugees registered in other European Union countries to be turned back from the Germany-Austria border, the Austrian government would follow suit.

“If Germany brings about such measures, then we will, of course, do the same in order to avert damage to the Republic of Austria,” Mr. Kurz told the German newspaper Bild on Sunday.

Ms. Merkel had warned of such a chain reaction, which could effectively spell an end for the free movement of people and goods across the Schengen area, a 26-nation grouping including Austria and Germany that has open borders among member states.

In an interview on Sunday, the chancellor defended her decision to seek a European solution. “We are living in times when there is a lot at stake,” Ms. Merkel said, adding a warning that Europe “is perhaps more in danger than we think.”

“The question of migration can break Europe apart,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Migrant Deal, Internal Party Scuffling Hastens Merkel’s Fall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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party-hard-or-die · 6 years