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Angela Merkel's government allies question spymaster deal, fuelling crisis

Hans-Georg Maassen had faced accusations of harbouring far-right views after he questioned the authenticity of video footage showing radicals hounding migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz.

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Two government parties are reconsidering a job transfer cobbled together for Germany's scandal-tainted domestic spymaster, tipping Angela Merkel's six-month-old 'grand coalition' deeper into crisis.

Hans-Georg Maassen had faced accusations of harbouring far-right views after he questioned the authenticity of video footage showing radicals hounding migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz.

On Tuesday, a deal was struck to move him into a better paid job at the interior ministry.

Social Democrats leader Andrea Nahles said the "overwhelmingly negative reactions from citizens" to that decision showed the three-party coalition had made a mistake.

"We have lost trust instead of restoring it," she wrote to the Chancellor and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, leader of the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), in a letter seen by Reuters.

"That should give us all reason to pause and reconsider the agreement."

The row over Maassen has exposed painful faultlines in German politics and wider society, where any espousal of far-right views has been anathema since the Nazi era.

Those inhibitions are less marked in the country's eastern regions, which were subject to political extremism as a satellite of the USSR until the country's reunification in 1990.

Nahles added that the SPD wanted to continue working in the coalition but that there needed to be trust in the alliance.

Seehofer has not ruled out new talks on the unpopular deal, a spokesman for the CSU - the sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) - said.

Merkel is due to give a statement later on Friday, a CDU spokesman said.

A poll published earlier on Friday taken partly before and partly after Maasen's comments showed that support for Merkel's conservative bloc has slumped to a new low, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) would be the second-biggest party if an election were held right away.

The anti-immigration AfD gained two points to a record high of 18 percent, with the SPD slipping to 17 percent.

The Maassen scandal comes only two months after Merkel closed a painful row with her Bavarian CSU allies on immigration - an issue that goes back to her 2015 decision to open Germany's borders to refugees fleeing war in the Middle East.

The SPD had wanted Maassen removed. But Seehofer stood behind him.
The grand coalition only took office in March, nearly six months after last year's election, as there was effectively no other viable governing option following the collapse of talks between Merkel's conservatives and two smaller parties.

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