Bremen-based political scientist Philip Manow said “cheesy ideas of Merkel’s Mother Teresa moment” live on, but Germans should not be fooled.
He said the real reason for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s widely-criticised open-door refugee policy was to save Germany from losing billions if its eurozone neighbour collapsed into economic ruin.
Writing for German newspaper FAZ, Mr Manow said: “The opening of the border was the almost inevitable protection of the Greece deal.”
Germany invested tens of billions in the rescue of its eurozone neighbour Greece in the face of bankruptcy.
At the same time, after the closure of the Balkan route, Greece was overwhelmed by a growing number of asylum seekers entering its country.
Mr Manow warned billions from the EU countries might have been lost had the institutions in Greece collapsed.
He wrote: ”In the chaos you would not even have to think about the requirements of the troika or just the punctual service of credit.”
The German public, however, had “no idea” of the “Euro crisis” in Greece and instead “completely cheesy ideas of Merkel’s Mother Teresa moment” are prevailing in Germany.
He said bailing out Greece “would quickly have become obsolete if Greece had in fact been left to its own devices with the refugee crisis because of the domino effect of the border closures of Hungary, via Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Macedonia”.
Greece experienced a dramatic rise in the number of people entering its country during the Europe migrant crisis.
Despite a pledge by EU member states in September 2015 to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers – including 106,000 from Greece and Italy – Greece saw an estimated 200 men, women and children cross its borders everyday in 2017.
In 2015 and 2016, there were 2,582,780 first-time asylum applications in Germany.
Even though Merkel’s migration policies are widely supported among her Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) party members and by coalition partners the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), there is increased appetite for stricter immigration measures in Germany.
Merkel’s own conservative Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), campaigned during the last elections on a platform of an upper limit to immigration and renewed border checks.
Additional reporting by Monika Pallenberg and Koen Berghuis