Germany reaches deal to send migrants back to Greece

Migrants who have already applied for asylum in Greece are to be sent back to the Mediterranean country, the German Interior Ministry said on Friday.

Last week Germany and Spain sealed a similar deal on returning migrants. Both deals come after a dispute between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and their Bavarian allies over returning migrants that nearly split them and brought down the government.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in a statement said, “The signature of an administrative agreement with Greece is a further step on the way to more orderly conditions in European migration policy.”

Ministry spokeswoman Eleonore Petermann told a news conference the Greek agreement, like the one with Spain, would allow Germany to send migrants entering via Germany’s border with Austria to Greece within 48 hours.

In exchange, Germany agreed to deal with a backlog of family reunification applications by the end of 2018, and to reconsider disputed cases, the ministry said.

Petermann said Germany was also in “very advanced” negotiations on a similar deal with the Italian government and she expected a deal to be struck. Last Friday Petermann said both Italy and Greece had made counterdemands.

The deals are not likely to affect many refugees. Figures from the Interior Ministry last week showed that since mid-June around 150 people who had already applied for asylum in another EU country had been detected entering Germany from Austria.

More than 1.6 million migrants have arrived in Germany since mid-2014, provoking tensions and propelling the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) into the national parliament.

Merkel has repeatedly defended her 2015 decision to admit hundreds of thousands of migrants as a humanitarian necessity, but has since vowed to prevent a re-run of such a migrant influx.

Speaking about the deal with Greece, she told a news conference: “It’s good that we’ve got a result.”