GERMAN POLITICIAN CALLS FOR NATIONAL BORDER CONTROLS

    Germany's populist, anti-immigrant AfD Party placed third in the recent elections, but judging by some recent by the newly-formed German government, they may as well have won.
    Last Friday Germany's new Interior Minister Horst Seehofer - a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CSU Bavarian allies who are further to the right than her own Christian Democrats - declared that "Islam does not belong to Germany", contradicting former German president Christian Wulff who fueled a debate over immigration in 2010 by saying "Islam was part of Germany" and also set out hardline immigration policies in his first major interview with Bild published last week.
    Over the weekend Seehofer again caused controversy by calling for national border controls, just as the EU wants them to be eased: "the EU was failing to control the external border" Germany's new interior minister said.
    "Not that many border points in Germany are permanently occupied," Seehofer told German weekly newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, adding: "We will now discuss whether that needs to change."