BERLIN, July 27 (Xinhua) -- A regional asylum agency, dedicated to assist the government with tasks such as carrying out deportations, opens in Bavaria's town of Manching on Friday amid protests.
The opening ceremony for the controversial organization was personally attended by Bavarian governor Markus Soeder (CSU), who voiced his desire to create such an agency in April.
The move, however, has been criticized by some in Bavaria as an attempt by the Christian Social Union (CSU) to win back voters from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) by copying their far-right rhetoric on immigration.
As a consequence, the Bavarian Refugee Council and other non-governmental organizations (NGO) gathered in Manching on Friday to protest the opening of the new agency.
"Deportations and the right-wing election strategy of the CSU are no reason to celebrate for us," brochures handed out by demonstrators read.
Soeder has explicitly described swifter deportations of asylum seekers who have failed to obtain legal resident permits in Germany as a key objective for the Manching-based organization.
The agency will only be able to perform an auxiliary function in this context, however, as the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) remains responsible for the conduct of asylum application procedures under German law.
Responding to criticism, Soeder insisted on Friday that Bavaria would be "much more open" and "use all available room for deliberation" on asylum procedures to facilitate the stay of well-integrated refugees in the country. He argued that just as citizens expected criminal asylum seekers to be deported quickly, they also wanted individuals who had shown a "willingness to integrate" to receive a fair chance in Germany.
The new facility is scheduled to become fully operational from Aug. 1 and will eventually reach a total headcount of 1,000 civil servants. In a further sign that the Bavarian government is keen to bolster its state-level control over asylum policy, the state also reactivated a defunct regional border police unit in July.
The CSU and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) traditionally form a conservative legislative alliance at the federal level but have recently become embroiled in a heated cabinet conflict over the trajectory of German asylum policy.
At the height of the spat, interior minister and CSU leader Horst Seehofer went as far as to threaten to either implement his "migration master plan" without the consent of Chancellor Angela Merkel or resign.
The ultimatum thus imposed by Seehofer constituted an unprecedented display of cabinet disobedience in Germany and was widely-interpreted as a step which could lead to the violent unravelling of the wider "grand coalition" government.
At the time, the German Social Democrats (SPD) publicly attacked the CSU for attempting to drag Merkel's cabinet to the "right-wing spectrum of politics" in a desperate attempt to ward off a challenge from the AfD in looming Bavarian elections.
Nevertheless, polls suggest that the CSU's attempts to toughen its stance on immigration have not done much to improve its electoral prospects so far.
In a ZDF "Politbarometer" survey published in June, Seehofer's rating in the poll fell from plus 0.3 to minus 0.3 between June and July. During the same period, the rating of Bavarian governor Markus Soeder (CSU) slumped from a rating of 0.1 to minus 0.5.
Soeder hereby received the worst rating of any CSU politician recorded on the "Politbarometer" scale from plus five to minus five during the past 10 years. By contrast, Merkel only witnessed a slight loss of popularity in the cabinet dispute with a rating of plus 0.9.
