Most of the German debate has focused on the influx of 1m refugees from outside Europe. Yet there have also been arguments about the arrival of poor migrants from eastern European EU members — notably Romanians and Bulgarians — whose numbers soared after they secured full access to the bloc’s labour market in 2014.
“I full and clearly support freedom of movement [of workers in the EU],” said labour minister Andrea Nahles, detailing the plans. “But freedom of access to social welfare is something else.”
It is a sign of how much the AfD is shaking German politics that the proposals come from Ms Nahles, a leftwing social democrat. The SPD is suffering even more than Ms Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc in the face of the AfD’s advance. Opinion polls show it around 20 per cent, an all-time low.
The far-left Left party has accused Ms Nahles of sorting EU citizens into “good and bad” and of trying to “strengthen her own party with rightwing populism.” It said: “If you think positively about Europe, you must develop European solutions instead of cutting yourself off.”
Government figures show 440,000 EU immigrants claimed benefits in January, with the biggest groups from Poland, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. However, the numbers include people doing low-paid work and claiming top-up benefits. They would not be affected by the proposals, which are limited to the jobless.
If adopted, the five-year curb would supersede a German Federal Services Court ruling from December that jobless EU migrants were entitled to some social benefits after six months. The judgment triggered fears among the local authorities that distribute most social welfare about growing benefits bills. They had been interpreting the rules flexibly and often granting unemployment benefits to EU migrants after periods much longer than six months.
Ms Nahles on Thursday insisted the new law would only codify existing practice. She was not changing the rules but closing “a loophole”, she said.
However, the five-year limit is new — and much longer than was under consideration earlier this year. When Olaf Scholz, the mayor of Hamburg and leading SPD figure, made headlines in January suggesting a one-year limit even that seemed tough to many social democrats.
The EU is struggling to respond to a surge of desperate migrants that has resulted in thousands of deaths
The proposals are likely to get a fair hearing from Ms Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc. The Bavaria-based CSU has argued for tougher rules on EU migrants, sometimes courting controversy by associating east Europeans with social security fraud.
Its leader, Horst Seehofer — a leading Merkel critic — said on Thursday he was happy to see “Berlin is taking up years-old demands from Bavaria”.
Ms Nahles said the new laws would conform with EU law. She cited two recent European Court of Justice cases in which German officials’ rights to withhold benefits from unemployed EU migrants were supported on the grounds that the migrants had not been seeking work. The first, in 2014, concerned Elisabeta Dano, a Romanian woman, who had never worked in either Romania or Germany. The second, this year, involved a Spanish man named Joel Pena Cuevas, who claimed benefits in 2012 without first seeking work.
The German debate on curbing EU migrants’ benefits echoes the intense arguments in the UK, as it prepares for its EU membership vote in June. Ms Merkel has previously promised to work with prime minister David Cameron in cutting welfare abuse
However, the new German plan would not address one of Mr Cameron’s core problems — migrants’ claims to in-work benefits to top-up low pay. The German proposal excludes migrants seeking in-work welfare payments, who could continue claiming benefits as now.
The German plan also has no direct connection to the UK-EU deal for EU reform under which member states would have access to “an emergency brake” — the right to suspend benefits for a certain period of high migrant inflows but only with the approval of the European Commission...
Edibted by: FL Media Pro
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