German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will mark a decade in power this month, has called emergency talks with her party’s (CDU) coalition partners SPD and the Bavarian sister-party CSU. The talks were held today in Berlin. Merkel called the emergency talks after Horst Seehofer of Bavaria’s CSU, threatened her with unspecified consequences if she did not take action to limit the number of people arriving into Germany by this Sunday. After today’s meeting, tensions are lowered since the Chancellors CDU accepts most of the CSU proposals now. Tonight the CDU and the CSU have agreed on the transit zones and other points.
The “transit zones”, as proposed by CSU-Boss Horst Seehofer, would be refugee and migrant processing points close to the German border at which people that don’t meet asylum criteria could be moved out of the country quickly. The majority of the up to one million refugees and migrants arrive into the country by crossing the border from Austria into Bavaria.
The SPD (Social-democratic Party of Germany) has rejected the conservative CSU’s transit zones proposal, and instead proposed for each of Germany's 16 states to create registration centres for asylum seekers on their own. SPD-Boss Sigmar Gabriel left the talks before the CDU and the CSU reached the agreement.