At a summit meeting in the Chancellery, the federal and state governments have provisionally agreed on a new distribution of the burden of refugee costs. This was announced by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz after the meeting with the state premiers in Berlin on Wednesday evening. According to this, the federal government will pay one billion euros more for the states and municipalities for 2023 due to the increased number of refugees. "Our country is facing a major challenge," Scholz said at the final press conference in the Federal Chancellery.
In November, a regular conference of prime ministers will discuss how the system can be further developed in the longer term, Scholz added. A working group is expected to make further proposals by then. Lower Saxony's Prime Minister Stephan Weil said the meeting had gone better than expected. On the question of financial burden sharing, the SPD politician said he understood that the federal government had to be restrictive because of the budget. However, the states also see the burdens on the municipalities. The positions between the federal and state governments are therefore not yet identical.
Scholz and Finance Minister Christian Lindner had originally said that the federal government could not pay more money. The states had called for a "breathing system" in which federal allocations would depend on the actual number of newly arriving asylum seekers. The main background to the debate is that the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) registered 101,981 first-time asylum applications in the first four months of this year. This is 78 percent more than in the previous year.