Germany's border crackdown could be less disruptive than first thought

As Germany is to start checks at all its land borders, clarifications from the authorities on how such checks will work suggest that the actual disruption to those crossing the border could be less than anticipated.

On Monday, Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced that Germany would start border controls at all land borders, running counter to the borderless Schengen Area rules, in a bid to tackle irregular migration. 

This will affect what is probably the most interconnected area in Europe: the ‘tripoint’ between Germany, France, and the Benelux, which formed the original Schengen Area. Additionally, there will be checks at the German-Danish border. 

In most of the regions by those borders, at least one in ten inhabitants commute to neighbouring countries for work, as Eurostat data from 2020 shows (EU average: one in 16).

However, Germany hopes the new measures will keep disruptions to a minimum.

“It will continue to be very important for us to coordinate with our neighbours and keep the impact on everyday life in the border regions as low as possible,” Faeser told journalists on Monday. EU partners were notified beforehand of the plans. 

On Wednesday, an interior ministry spokesperson told journalists that the new controls would likely follow the example of existing controls at the Polish, Czech, Swiss and Austrian borders, which have been in place since October 2023 and 2015, respectively.

Rather than forcing every vehicle to stop at stationary checkpoints, existing checks are often spot checks and mobile controls, whereby police only flag down specific cars when they have “hints of people smugglers and cross-border crime”, the spokesperson said.

Controls are, therefore, unlikely to mark a fallback to pre-Schengen times, whereby every car was stopped.

In fact, after Germany’s announcement, cars could continue to cross the same number of Schengen-exempt borders going from Denmark to France via the Benelux countries and Germany without stopping once.

Cross-border businesses have felt encouraged by existing checks, including those during the summer’s sports tournaments, when Germany and France conducted checks at all borders. Controls focused on people rather than cross-border business traffic. 

“We have no knowledge of significant economic losses [during that time],” Frank Huster, chief executive of the association of German freight forwarding businesses, DSLV, told Euractiv. 

The German Eastern Business Association (OA), representing companies trading with Eastern Europe, told Euractiv that its members could quickly adapt in “a pragmatic way” to the new situation they have been subjected to at the eastern borders.

However, while there will mostly be no need to stop at the border, local media in the affected regions reported that sporadic spot checks still created bottlenecks that caused “kilometres of traffic jams” during the European football tournament.

This irritated both commuters and foreign officials, with Luxembourg’s Interior Minister Léon Gloden complaining that German authorities did not stick to prior agreements, leading to some concern from businesses.

Moreover, Faeser has boasted that checks since October have seen 30,000 illegal crossers being turned away at the border as they were either barred from entering or did not claim asylum. With more checks, this number could rise, creating pressure on neighbouring countries to take in more migrants or close their borders, too.

This casts a shadow on Faeser’s insistence that coordination with European allies remains paramount. The interior ministry has also avoided specifying details, such as whether commercial vehicles will be affected.

The lingering uncertainty has led both the DSLV and the OA to emphasise that border controls always hold risks, as they hope for “a measured” implementation. 

Omid Nouripour, co-leader of the Greens, a junior partner in Germany’s government coalition, inadvertently echoed this stance when dismissing the opposition’s call for harsher measures.  

“If we close all our borders, as a country in the centre of Europe where trucks go from Poland to France, and from Sweden to Italy, (…) we will contribute to trucks piling up at the border instead of refugees,” he said. 

“That harms the European Union.”

[Edited by Alice Taylor-Braçe]