German border checks the frustrating new normal in what was the heart of EU’s open-border Schengen area

With music, cheers and a few tears, a new bridge opened 20 years ago linking the Saxon city of Görlitz, Germany, and its Polish sister across the River Neisse, Zgorzelec.
EU accession at the stroke of midnight on May 1st, 2004 – and Poland’s entry to the passport-free Schengen zone – consigned old divisions to the past. The end of all border checks across the river crossing meant traffic improved, too.
Until October 13th last, that is, when border checks returned – as did the tailbacks.
“It’s particularly bad on Monday mornings now, a real bottleneck,” said Hans, a 50-something haulier who covers this Poland-German route.
From next Monday, traffic may tighten up still further – this time across Europe – as Germany imposes checks on all of its national frontiers, including with France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Polish prime minister Donald Tusk spoke for many German neighbours on Tuesday when he called the unilateral move an “unacceptable… effective suspension, in a major way, of the Schengen Agreement”.
A European Commission spokeswoman said such checks – planned for six months – must “only be an exception”. For nearly a decade, though, Brussels has turned a blind eye to one German exception after another. Border checks are the new normal here in what used to be the heart of Europe’s open-border Schengen area.
During the 2015 migration crisis, Danish border police reintroduced passport checks on the country’s border with Germany, while German police introduced spot checks there and on Bavaria’s frontier with Austria.
These “temporary” controls cut the numbers of new so-called irregular arrivals, but migrants – and human smugglers – soon found new routes. That prompted Germany last October to reintroduce additional checkpoints on those routes too: its Swiss, Czech and Polish borders.
Just a month earlier, federal interior minister Nancy Faeser of the Social Democratic Party insisted such stationary checkpoints were impractical and ineffective. “It means, too, that ordinary people – carers, tradespeople – have a difficult time each day,” she told German public television.
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A month later she changed her mind and, according to her ministry, the new checks since October have resulted in about 30,000 refusals of entry. But that pales next to the 300,000 people who filed for asylum last year in Germany, the 124,000 “illegal entries” in that period and the 50,000 people still in the country despite failed asylum applications.
Among the latter group is the Syrian man accused of fatally stabbing three people at a city fair in Solingen last month, an attack that left eight further people injured.
That attack, and revelations of how the suspect had successfully dodged deportation, supercharged eastern state elections already dominated by migration and security issues. In record numbers, voters backed the hard anti-immigration stance of Alternative for Germany, which won in Thuringia the first far-right victory since the Nazi era.
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Alarmed by those results – and another likely AfD surge in Brandenburg before a September 22nd state election there – Berlin’s coalition has now moved quickly to make the previously impossible possible.
To make the checks compatible with EU law, Faeser is arguing the border checks are essential to “regulate irregular migration” and “protect inner security”.
The announcement was also a pre-emptive move ahead of a high-stakes migration summit on Tuesday with the opposition Christian Democratic Union Party leader Friedrich Merz has pushed a harder migration line since the Solingen attacks, demanding fast-track deportation of asylum seekers already registered in another EU member state under so-called Dublin rules.
On Tuesday, the ruling coalition presented the CDU with proposals for “fast-track procedures” in border regions, including detention in local prisons, to prevent migrants moving further into Germany until previous EU asylum applications are ruled out.
“We are prepared to do everything to solve the migration crisis,” said federal justice minister Marco Buschmann.
But Merz and his centre-right allies walked out of Tuesday’s talks. They insisted the new proposals did not go far enough and that it was not a certainty that additional deportations would take place.
“This coalition has capitulated on irregular migration – this government is hamstrung and leaderless,” said the opposition leader.
The border checks plan has divided chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition, with Green co-leader Ricarda Lang warning that “national solo runs lead to chaos and division in Europe”.
Faeser insisted she would proceed with the proposals for border prisons and rapid deportation – even without CDU backing.
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As migration ramps up tensions in the bickering Scholz coalition, few in Berlin expect Germany’s “temporary” border measures to be eased before June 2026. That is when, all going to plan, a new EU migration and asylum pact comes into effect, with shared rules, a central database and other EU-wide standards on the charged immigration issue.
Back in the self-titled “Europe City Görlitz-Zgorzelec”, local police and opposition politicians say traffickers have reacted to the border checks by moving elsewhere, while immigration has not dropped.
For Clara Bünger, a Bundestag MP for Görlitz for the opposition Left Party, the new border check plan is “pure window-dressing politics”.
“The federal government in Berlin is allowing itself be driven on by fear, of the AfD and its racist demands,” said Bünger, the Left’s Bundestag spokeswoman on justice and migration affairs.
“With these ongoing controls, Germany is undermining European law and, with that, the basis for co-operation between member states.”