Tsipras makes new deal with Merkel regarding refugees

Massive waves of refugees and migrants flooded Europe over the past few years, adding to the migration that Europe has been encountering now for decades. With a worsening demographic winter blowing over the region together with increasing poverty and income inequality, the refugee crisis brings with it a host of new liabilities, political, demographic, cultural, and economic in nature, to be faced by the bloc.

On the sidelines of the Brussels summit, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras took a few moments to strike something of an agreement between Greece and Germany of a bilateral nature. The deal basically means that Greece agrees to accept migrants which are identified by the Germans However, specific details on what the definitions or functional nature of this agreement haven’t manifested as of yet.

According to Greek Reporter

Alexis Tsipras met Chancellor Angela Merkel in Brussels on Friday on the sidelines of an EU summit to hammer out a bilateral deal on irregular migration affecting Greece and Germany.

Merkel told reporters she had struck bilateral deals with Spain and Greece, but said no such deal had been made with Italy, another southern European country struggling to deal with the migration crisis.

The deal with Greece comes as an EU summit agreed that member states would take in some migrants rescued from the Mediterranean sea route, but exact details on the agreement remain sketchy.

However, the bilateral deal with Greece will see Athens readmit asylum seekers identified by the German authorities at their border. Germany will “gradually accept and conclude the family reunification cases in Greece and Spain with a view to guaranteeing family unity” it states.

The operational nature of the deal will be ironed out in the next four weeks.

The issue has been somewhat of a political football game threatening the unity of the Union and the political stability of some governments. For this reason, it was necessary that some sort of talks went down to address the issue, whether it resolved the crisis itself or not, just as long as it relieved some political pressure, which is essentially what a recent summit in Brussels was able to achieve.

Of course, in this instance, the summit didn’t resolve the crisis, though no one really expected it to. And, also as a matter of course, the root causes of the migration crisis itself were not addressed in a meaningful way, leaving the problem to continue to fester.