AT POINTS in recent days, any compromise between Angela Merkel and the Christian Social Union (CSU), the conservative Bavarian sister party to her Christian Democrats (CDU), seemed impossible. Perhaps with an eye to her legacy as a guardian of the multilateral international order, the chancellor insisted that unilateral German action to turn back asylum-seekers registered in other EU states could trigger a wave of such actions from other countries, imperilling Europe’s notionally border-free Schengen zone. Horst Seehofer, the CSU interior minister, insisted that only this measure could prevent such immigrants from becoming Germany’s responsibility. Room for a deal between these two positions seemed scarce.

But last night they found it. Having been urged to find common ground at a meeting of MPs from the two parties on Monday afternoon, and by Wolfgang Schäuble, the Bundestag president, former finance minister and something of a broker between the two sides, Mrs Merkel and Mr Seehofer sat down together, flanked by allies, at around 5pm. More than five hours later a single-page agreement materialised, containing three brief points. Mrs Merkel declared it a “really good compromise” and Mr Seehofer withdrew his threat, issued the night before, to resign from her cabinet. With that the crisis that at moments had threatened to propel the CSU out of Germany’s governing coalition (perhaps even bringing down Mrs Merkel in the process) seems to have been defused.

But has it? The deal agreed last night goes a long way towards Mr Seehofer’s position. There will be a new regime on the German-Austrian border—the main entry point to Germany for asylum-seekers travelling from southern Europe—“making sure that asylum-seekers for whose asylum procedures other EU states are responsible are prevented from entering the country”. There will be transit centres, reportedly at or close to German borders, at which asylum-seekers will be held and from which rejected asylum-seekers will be promptly deported to their countries of arrival in the EU, under deals to be negotiated with those other countries. And where deals with the countries in question do not exist, the asylum-seekers will be turned back at the German-Austrian border under a deal to be done between the two countries. 

The package has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese. For one thing, the centre-left Social Democrats, who also form part of Mrs Merkel’s coalition government, are firmly opposed to the transit centres. In 2015 Sigmar Gabriel, then the party’s leader, proudly declared: “The SPD has prevailed. Transit zones are off the table. No detention, no fence.” Heiko Maas, now the foreign minister, has said that camps on the borders would create more problems than they solve. The leaderships of the CDU, CSU and the SPD are due to meet this afternoon to discuss the deal. For now the SPD leadership is holding its fire.

Then there is Austria, currently led by a coalition of the centre-right and the far-right. This morning the government in Vienna issued a terse statement: “Should this agreement become German government policy we see it as our job to put in place actions to head off disadvantages for Austria and its people. The federal government is therefore prepared to take measures to protect our southern border in particular”. In other words: if Germany starts turning back migrants at the Austrian border, Austria will do the same on its borders with Italy and Slovenia. Austria has long threatened to impose new controls at the Brenner Pass, the main road link across the Alps. 

Which brings us to Italy: Matteo Salvini, the new right-wing interior minister in Rome, has said his country cannot take one more asylum-seeker, and in fact wants to reduce the numbers currently there. His country is the largest source of the “secondary migration” that Mrs Merkel’s deal with Mr Seehofer proposes to reduce. Though the chancellor has already negotiated the outlines of repatriation deals with other EU states, including Spain and Greece, the various financial inducements and offers of support dangled in front of other states seem to have left the Italian government unmoved. Without that deal a sizeable share of the asylum-seekers detected at the border will, under the CDU-CSU agreement, be turned back to an Austria that does not want them. Something will have to give.

Perhaps Mrs Merkel can fudge all of this. The SPD is weak, its own base is split on immigration and the party may not want to risk reigniting the conflict between the CDU and CSU. The new border controls could amount to intensified checks on trains, buses and main roads into Germany from Austria; maybe, to judge by the way these things work elsewhere in Europe, with a dose of racial profiling. In Bavaria the CSU is already rolling out “anchor centres”: centralised, though non-detaining, facilities for holding asylum-seekers while their claims are processed. Indeed Mr Seehofer and Mrs Merkel have both urged other federal states to adopt the model. The CSU is close to Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian chancellor, so might persuade him to play along. It helps all parties that secondary migration to Germany is more modest in scale than the recent theatrics in Berlin might suggest: under 20,000 asylum-seekers registered in other EU countries have entered the country (population: 83m) this year so far. 

The future of the Schengen zone may be written on the Bavarian-Austrian border in the coming months. One where free travel (at least for those who do not look like they might be asylum-seekers) is preserved at the cost of intensive discretionary checks; detention centres outside the EU’s external borders and holding centres on its internal ones; fast deportations; and a web of pricey bilateral deals. And in which, despite all those things, countries like Austria still feel compelled to threaten the closure, or restriction, of internal borders within the zone. Quite how far this goes towards preserving the multilateral, liberal European order Mrs Merkel so cherishes—and as whose protector in dark times she may wish to be remembered—is a matter for debate. 

It is all a high price for Mrs Merkel to pay to keep her interior minister. The CSU’s war of attrition against the chancellor, driven partly by personal animus and partly by panic about the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party ahead of state elections in Bavaria in October, is surely not over. Only yesterday Mr Seehofer was fuming to an interviewer: “I won’t be dismissed by a chancellor who is only chancellor thanks to me”. Having secured last night’s concessions, his party’s leadership will surely demand more; either on immigration or on other subjects like the proposed reforms to the euro zone. The conflict may be not defused, but postponed.