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FILE – On Thursday, April 14, 2016, photo left, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Horst Seehofer, President of the German Christian Social Union and Andrea Nahles, President of the German Social-Democrats, address the media at a press conference in Berlin. Leaders of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition on Sunday attempted to solve the problem of the future of the country's chief of domestic intelligence and stabilize their six-month alliance. (Michael Sohn / Associated Press)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that it was time for her coalition government to stop bogging down in internal quarrels after its leaders reached an agreement to solve its second major crisis in just three months.
Merkel said she regretted the handling of the latest dispute over the future of the head of the German intelligence services and called on the biggest German parties to come out of internal political struggles.
"It's even more important to solve people's problems," she said. "In many areas, we have been too concerned about ourselves in recent months. It must change. "
On Sunday, coalition leaders resolved an increasingly fierce conflict against the head of the BfV's spy agency, Hans-Georg Maassen. The center-left Social Democrats had demanded his dismissal after appearing to downplay the recent far-right violence against migrants in the city of Chemnitz in the east of the country.
Coalition leaders initially agreed last week to remove Maassen from his current position, but make him a deputy minister of the interior, giving him a promotion and a big pay rise. Their decision triggered a reaction that led the leader of the Social Democrats Andrea Nahles to demand renegotiation.
Maassen will now become a "special adviser" to Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has supported the official and refused to fire him, but he will not be promoted or will not be relaunched.
The saga has again beaten the image of Merkel's coalition of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, the exclusively Bavarian Social Christian Union and Social Democrats of Seehofer, which only took office in March, .
He highlighted the personal and political tensions in an alliance that took six months to negotiate and seems to lack confidence and energy. Last year, the three ruling parties lost their support and the far-right alternative for Germany entered parliament.
In June, Merkel and Seehofer, a conservative ally but a persistent criticism of her initially welcoming approach to large numbers of migrants in 2015, quarreled for weeks before returning a small number of asylum seekers. asylum to the German-Austrian coalition. border.
Merkel conceded on Monday that the original Maassen deal "was not convincing," saying she thought too much about organizational details "but too little about how people feel when they hear about a promotion."
"I very much regret that this can happen," she told reporters in Berlin without answering questions.
Merkel said coalition leaders will meet next week to discuss "urgent issues", such as how to ensure that diesel car owners do not prohibit air quality issues. . She noted that it was "particularly difficult times" and said that they required "total concentration on substantive work".
Germany will face two important parliamentary elections next month, in Bavaria on 14 October and in neighboring Hessen on 28 October. The former fueled tensions, with the Seehofer CSU doing surveys and poor results.
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