Angela Merkel’s conservative alliance has provisionally agreed on plans to create transit zones along Germany’s border in an effort to control the large number of refugee arrivals by sifting out those who have no chance of gaining asylum.

As a fierce debate rages over how Germany can cope with the thousands of people continuing to arrive each day, initial proposals are for designated areas that would act as holding camps where refugees who arrived at the border would in effect be contained until their origin and right to seek asylum had been established.

Politicians from the German chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have agreed to draw up a definitive plan this week that could be decided on by the coalition within days, the government’s refugee coordinator, Peter Altmaier, said.

Merkel told a group of CDU supporters that the aim was to stop people coming from countries that were deemed safe before they officially gained entry to Germany.

“It must be clear that Germany is helping those who have a prospect of staying, and those who haven’t, cannot get help in our country,” she said, adding that the parties were still in talks.

The widespread belief is that only by speeding up the asylum and extradition procedures for migrants coming from south-eastern Europe will Germany be able to focus adequately on those from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is estimated that up to 1.5 million refugees could arrive in Germany in 2015.

A draft bill has reportedly already been drawn up. But the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Merkel’s grand coalition, have voiced strong opposition to the plans, with some in the party comparing the transit zones to prison camps.

The conservative backers of the plan say the legal framework already exists, as refugees can already be held in the transit areas of airports. But critics insist a transit zone on Germany’s land border is hardly comparable as it is not in a confined area, and the only way of making it so would be to seal the entire border.



Questioning the legality, the SPD justice minister, Heiko Maas, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the transit zones would amount to “vast encampments in no man’s land”, that would send a “fatal signal”.

But Stephan Mayer, a CSU politician specialising in home policy, said the transit zones would enable a better distinction to be made between “justified and non-justified” applicants.

“More than 50% of all those who come to Germany as asylum seekers or refugees are not accepted as either, and with this in mind, I believe this would be an important measure in order to strengthen the selection process,” he told the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.

Asked by the presenter to justify his use of the word “selection” because of its strong association with the Nazi era, Mayer added: “We’re not talking here about mass encampments or concentration camps, this is simply about being able to make a stronger differentiation between those in need of protection and those who have no right to asylum.

“It’s not a ghettoisation of asylum seekers,” he said. “Rather, in my view, a very pragmatic strategy that has been undertaken by other EU countries for some time.”

By supporting the idea, Merkel has been accused of giving into the demands of Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU and prime minister of Bavaria, where the majority of refugees to Germany are arriving. He has repeatedly accused her not only of causing the refugee influx, after she declared last month that the borders were open to those who needed help, but also of failing to have a plan of action to deal with the situation.

But politicians who have asked for precise details as to how the transit zones would work, particularly as Germany’s land border is about 1,860 miles (3,000km) long, as well as where they would be built and how the migrants there would be accommodated, have so far not received any clear answers.

Cem Özdemir, of the Greens, said the only way such a system could operate was by “completely sealing the entire 3,000km, with the use of barbed wire, a shoot-to-kill order, with a wall similar to the one we had between East and West Germany. I can’t really imagine that anyone is seriously demanding that.”

Other critics of the plan said refugees and migrants would quickly learn to avoid the transit zones and enter at other points along the border instead. Some warned it would only encourage the already booming trade in people smuggling.

A government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, was quoted in the German media as saying that while transit zones were “not a measure that will solve all problems”, they would possibly “help contribute to bringing order to the refugee situation”.

While goodwill remains strong among the majority of Germans, thousands of whom continue to volunteer their assistance to refugee arrivals, a growing discontentment is being felt among certain groups. The anti-immigration movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) appears to have gained renewed momentum as a result of the refugee crisis.

At a weekly rally in Dresden on Monday evening, which attracted an estimated 9,000 protesters, observers noted that the group had sharpened its anti-foreigner rhetoric. Some protesters carried a gallows modelled out of wood, with nooses labelled “reserved for Angela ‘Mutti’ Merkel” and her deputy chancellor and SPD chairman, Sigmar Gabriel. Pegida’s organiser, Lutz Bachmann, who has been charged with inciting racial hatred after calling asylum seekers “trash” and “animals” on his Facebook page, accused the government of fuelling a civil war in Europe.

Another speaker, Tatjana Festerling, drew strong applause as she called for the state of Saxony, home to Dresden, to secede from the rest of Germany for its own protection. She railed against migrants, referring to them as “strangers in our land, who loiter about on camp beds, and go on the rampage”,and accused Merkel of having “made out of Germany a huge ‘I’m a Celebrity-style’ jungle camp”.