Migrant Crisis Clashes With Germany’s Oktoberfest, Highlighting Broader Pushback on Merkel’s Policy

Migrant Crisis Clashes With Germany’s Oktoberfest, Highlighting Broader Pushback on Merkel’s Policy

Giant beer party opens Saturday as Bavaria and the rest of Germany struggle to house tens of thousands of asylum seekers

By ANDREA THOMAS in Munich and

ANTON TROIANOVSKI in Berlin

Updated Sept. 17, 2015 5:43 a.m. ET / http://www.wsj.com/articles/migrant-crisis-dims-the-festive-mood-at-munichs-oktoberfest-1442482201?mod=e2fb

Germany’s biggest crisis in years is colliding with its biggest party: Oktoberfest.

The confluence of the tide of migrants into southern Germany and the Saturday start of Munich’s huge two-week festival, attended last year by 6.3 million people who consumed about two million gallons of beer, is highlighting the immense political and logistical challenges the migration crisis poses for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

With Oktoberfest host Bavaria at the forefront, German states have been clamoring with rising urgency that they are stretched to the very limits in sheltering the more than 90,000 people who have arrived in the country this month to seek asylum. And politically, Ms. Merkel faces the rising risk of a backlash at home for opening Germany’s doors to refugees.

“We can’t put the whole world or half of the world back on their feet,” said Richard Müller, an 80-year-old Munich resident and Oktoberfest regular who said his mood to celebrate is tarnished by the high number of migrants in the city. “They will pull us down.”

‘Asylum seekers, in particular from Muslim countries, aren’t used to encountering heavily drunk people in public. It could get out of hand.’

—Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann

The southern German state of Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital, has been the main point of entry for the Syrians and others who have streamed into Germany seeking asylum since the start of September. It is also Germany’s most conservative and tradition-bound state, with its own dominant political party, the Christian Social Union, which is part of Ms. Merkel’s governing coalition on the federal level.

Leaders of the CSU, despite their political alliance with Ms. Merkel, attacked her publicly in the aftermath of her decision early this month to let in thousands of migrants stranded in Hungary. CSU chief Horst Seehofer, the governor of Bavaria, described the move as “a mistake that we will be dealing with for a long time.” And he demanded that the government keep new arrivals seeking asylum out of Munich during Oktoberfest.

“Asylum seekers in particular from Muslim countries aren’t used to encountering heavily drunk people in public,” Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said. “It could get out of hand.”

This week, Munich police officials tried to reassure the public that they have matters under control. The biggest challenge, deputy Munich police chief Werner Feiler said, would be keeping order at the central train station, which could have large numbers of beer festival visitors and migrants passing through simultaneously.

“We have currently here in Munich a situation that doesn’t compare to any Wiesn operation before,” Mr. Feiler said, using the colloquial Bavarian term for Oktoberfest’s main venue in central Munich.

A spokesman for Ms. Merkel this week wouldn’t comment on whether or not the border controls Germany implemented on Sunday to stem the tide of migrants had anything to do with Mr. Seehofer’s call to keep them away from Oktoberfest.

But the move appeared to have had the desired effect: the number of people seeking asylum arriving at the Munich central train station declined from a peak of 12,000 on Saturday to 1,800 on Tuesday. Since the border controls were put in place, Germany has been registering asylum seekers as soon as they crossed from Austria and dispatching them to shelters directly from there.

Tuesday night, after a four-hour emergency meeting with Mr. Seehofer and the other governors of Germany’s 16 states, Ms. Merkel pledged more assistance. The federal government in Berlin, she said, would provide shelter space for 40,000 people to relieve some of the pressure on the states and deploy mobile teams to process asylum requests and decide more quickly whether or not migrants are allowed to stay.

But even if Bavaria and the rest of Germany can manage Oktoberfest and the other immediate logistics of the crisis, analysts say Ms. Merkel faces the growing risk of pushback at home for opening Germany’s doors to refugees. Criticism from Bavaria’s CSU could turn out to be only the tip of the iceberg, University of Mainz political scientist Jürgen Falter said.

“The biggest problem for her is shifting public opinion,” Mr. Falter said of Ms. Merkel. “The CSU simply says it out loud.”

For now, polls show scant evidence that Germans are losing faith in Ms. Merkel’s handling of the crisis. A poll over the weekend found nearly two-thirds of Germans saying they don’t fear that too many refugees were coming to their country. Ms. Merkel herself responded in unusually personal terms on Tuesday to criticism that she was being too welcoming.

“If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in emergency situations, then this is not my country,” Ms. Merkel said.

On Munich’s main shopping street on Tuesday, women in abayas—the long robes worn by some Muslim women—were studying lederhosen and dirndls—the revealing shorts and dresses traditional in Bavaria—in the shop windows.

“I can understand that Mr. Seehofer was angry at Ms. Merkel,” said Bernhard Hannfelder, a 64-year-old pensioner from the Bavarian district of Fürstenfeldbruck, some 18 miles west of Munich. “One simply can’t just stand there and say ‘everybody come to us.’ We are very friendly people, but there are limits.”

Write to Andrea Thomas at andrea.thomas@wsj.com and Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com