Migrant
Influx Ruffles Germans
Initial
sentiment of welcome fades in face of fears, chaotic scenes and
growing numbers
By ANTON TROIANOVSKI
Oct. 2, 2015 4:46
p.m. ET
BERLIN—Four weeks
after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to refugees and
Germans welcomed them with applause and food, worries are mounting
that the country has been overwhelmed.
Ms. Merkel’s
long-lofty approval ratings are falling back to earth. Senior
officials are voicing fears of terrorists among the migrants as towns
and cities run out of shelter space. And in a country that prizes
order, polls show that Germans are losing faith that their government
is up to the task of managing the influx as the news media show
chaotic scenes of migrants sleeping outside and police responding to
fights at shelters.
“It is simply too
much,” said Karin Pahlitzsch, a 57-year-old teacher in the eastern
German city of Dresden, referring to the number of people coming to
Germany. “But the worst thing is how poorly organized everything
is.”
Unlike past European
crises such as Ukraine and the early-summer debt showdown with
Greece, the migration crisis directly affects Germans’ daily lives.
Auditoriums, gyms, and trade-show halls are being converted to
emergency shelters. Government officials are starting to openly voice
frustration that migrants are misbehaving, stoking fears that the
influx could lead to a rise in crime.
“Until summer, the
refugees were thankful to be here with us,” Interior Minister
Thomas de Maizière said on ZDF public television Thursday night.
Now, he said, some “go on strike because they don’t like their
shelter, they make trouble because they don’t like the food, they
fight in the asylum-seeker facilities.”
Germany-based
Islamists have been approaching migrants, particularly minors
traveling alone, Mr. de Maizière said Friday after meeting with
security officials. And intelligence agencies have warned that
Islamic State jihadists could try to sneak into Germany with the
migrants, he said.
‘We in Germany are
rapidly approaching the limits of what we can do.’
—
Vice Chancellor
Sigmar Gabriel, head of the SPD
In early September,
many Germans flocked to train stations to welcome arriving migrants,
and commentators described the outpouring of generosity as a “summer
fairy tale” in a country whose Nazi history still complicates
feelings of national pride. Polls showed that most Germans stood
behind Ms. Merkel after she declared “We can do it!” in response
to questions over whether Germany could handle the flow of people.
But a poll released
late Thursday showed Ms. Merkel’s approval rating fell in recent
weeks to 54% after some three years around 70%. The poll, conducted
by research firm Infratest Dimap earlier this week, also found that
51% of Germans feared that too many refugees were arriving in their
country—up from 38% a month ago.
In a speech in
eastern Germany Thursday ahead of Saturday’s 25th anniversary of
the country’s reunification, Ms. Merkel attempted to rally German
spirits. She described accommodating migration as a “herculean task
that now deeply moves us and demands from us a national effort.”
Germany, working with the European Union and Turkey to try to channel
the tide of migrants, will be able to overcome the crisis, she said.
The chancellor, who
has led Europe’s largest economy for a decade, has long garnered
high marks from Germans for calm and pragmatism under pressure. She
faced other major crises such as the Greek debt showdown and the
Ukraine conflict without losing significant support at home.
But this time,
Germans appear to be more skeptical of her response. An Emnid poll
for television broadcaster N24 published Thursday found 59% of
respondents disagreed with her “We can do it” promise in the
refugee crisis.
Amid the nation’s
unease, leaders of other political parties in Ms. Merkel’s
governing coalition are increasingly sowing doubts about her crisis
management. Horst Seehofer, governor of the state of Bavaria and head
of Ms. Merkel’s sister conservative party there, has repeatedly
criticized the chancellor’s generosity toward migrants. His
approval rating shot up 11 points, to 39%, in the monthly Infratest
Dimap poll released on Thursday.
“We in Germany are
rapidly approaching the limits of what we can do,” Vice Chancellor
Sigmar Gabriel, head of the left-of-center Social Democrats, told
news website Spiegel Online on Friday. “Many places in Germany are
already overwhelmed.” Mr. Gabriel is widely expected to challenge
the conservative Ms. Merkel in the 2017 election.
The sense of a
crisis slipping out of the government’s control is being fed by
images of chaos at shelters and registration points.
The port city of
Hamburg, which is sheltering about 30,000 migrants and has received
some 500 a day for the past month, was under particular strain this
week. Tuesday night, 500 migrants slept in the open near the city’s
main registration point because all shelters were full.
On Wednesday,
desperate city officials sought to put up the migrants in a vacant
tennis hall but couldn’t contact the owner to let them in. They
sent firefighters to break open the door. Later in the day, the city
found two schools with enough space to house newly arrived migrants
and didn’t need to use the tennis hall, city official Björn
Domroese said.
But the additional
space didn’t head off violence in two other Hamburg asylum shelters
Wednesday night. At one, in a vacant hardware store, two groups of
people got into a fight, some of them armed with pieces of furniture,
the police said.
In Berlin close to
Ms. Merkel’s chancellery, scores of newcomers sleep on the street
every night outside the main asylum office in the hopes of getting a
spot in line for registration—a prerequisite for access to
shelters.
Once registered,
they have to wait for their number to be posted on a screen to
proceed to the next step in the asylum-seeking process. On Thursday,
people interviewed in the courtyard said they had been coming there
every day for more than 20 days. Some still expressed gratitude that,
at least, they were safe.
Raed Almarey, a
32-year-old from Damascus, was waiting with his wife and a brother on
flattened cardboard boxes spread out on the lawn. He said the family
had fled after two of his brothers were arrested by government
forces.
“Waiting here for
a year is better than being arrested for an hour [in Syria],” he
said.
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