Olaf Scholz’s rejection of Angela Merkel’s open borders policy is now complete but it comes too late to stop him from losing the chancellorship of Germany.
Imposing temporary controls at all of Germany’s borders has only strengthened opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the centre-Right CDU before federal elections next September.
He already looks like a chancellor-in-waiting and has been polling far stronger than Mr Scholz’s SPD and his warring coalition partners.
After claiming credit for the new policy, Mr Merz warned his hapless rival he needed to do much more.
Mr Merz has long since disowned the legacy of Mrs Merkel, a CDU chancellor for 16 years, who threw open the borders to more than a million Syrians crossing Europe.
That move, during the 2015 migrant crisis, saved the EU’s Schengen zone policy of passport-free movement.
It came when many member states were reintroducing border controls to deal with the biggest movement of displaced people on the Continent since the Second World War.
In 2021, the centre-Left Mr Scholz, Mrs Merkel’s vice chancellor in a coalition government, won the first election to be held following her resignation, after he campaigned as a “Merkel 2.0”.
Since then, her policies on Russia and immigration have been discredited in a country which has taken in a million Ukrainian refugees in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.