BERLIN — Refugees who come to Germany after entering the European Union through Spain can be turned back at the border under the terms of an agreement between Berlin and Madrid, the German Interior Ministry said Wednesday.
The agreement, which was signed Monday and will take effect Saturday, is the first of its kind since June, when an argument over border controls threatened to bring down the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
The rule, which will allow Germany to turn away refugees arriving along that increasingly important migration route, is a sign of how the country’s politics have shifted since 2015, when Merkel welcomed more than 1 million people.
The chancellor won verbal agreement for such deals from Greece, Italy, and Spain at a Brussels meeting in June, after her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to establish a hard border between Germany and Austria to halt migrants.
Beginning Saturday, anyone entering Germany who is determined to have already registered as a refugee in Spain can be sent back there within 48 hours, Eleonore Petermann, a spokeswoman for the German Interior Ministry, said. Germany did not offer Spain compensation, she said.
Talks with Athens and Rome are also underway, Petermann added. The agreement reached with Spain could serve as a basis for deals with those two countries, said Mathias Middelberg, a lawmaker with Merkel’s conservative party.
In an interview with the German daily Handelsblatt, Josep Borrell, the Spanish foreign minister, said the new deal would affect only a “very small’’ number of people. But he warned that the Schengen system, which allows people and goods to travel freely among some EU member states, could be endangered by further measures to return to hard borders.
“That is the great risk, if we don’t accept that we now have a shared outer border, then we will lose the advantages of Schengen,’’ Borrell said. “For Spain, with its 80 million visiting tourists every year, that would amount to a logistical and financial meltdown.’’
Saturday, as the deal comes into effect, Merkel will begin a visit with Pedro Sánchez, the new prime minister of Spain.
In recent months, Spain has become a front line of migration to Europe, after the closing of Hungary’s border to Serbia and Austria’s crackdown on migrant arrivals, which have led fewer people to try to illegally enter Europe via the Mediterranean shores of Greece and Italy.
Over 26,500 asylum-seekers entered Spain in the first eight months of this year, according to the International Organization for Migration — more than in all of 2017.
Under current practice, the EU country where migrants first arrive is responsible for registering them and determining whether they are refugees. But that system was established before the war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State group, which drove hundreds of thousands of people to seek refuge.
Countries on the Continent’s perimeter complain that the practice forces them to carry a disproportionate burden.
