Merkel
pushes the vision thing on migration
Chancellor
addresses migration crisis, pleasing all sides of her party in the
process.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
12/14/15, 8:53 PM CET Updated 12/14/15, 9:15 PM CET
KARLSRUHE, Germany —
Angela Merkel, a trained physicist with an analytical mindset, likes
to appeal to Germans’ logic rather than their feelings when
promoting her policy ideas, but she pulled out all the emotional
stops Monday to sell her strategy on refugees.
Trying to allay
fears in her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that Germany will be
swamped by an estimated one million refugees who are expected to
arrive this year, the chancellor told the CDU party congress that her
decision three months ago to open the borders to people fleeing war
in Syria was a “humanitarian imperative,” which she cast in a
tradition of CDU post-war statesmen like Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig
Erhard and Helmut Kohl.
The migration crisis
is “a historic test for Europe,” said the conservative
chancellor. Judging by the 10-minute standing ovation that greeted
her speech, it worked like a dream.
With a wide-ranging
73-minute address to the party faithful in Karlsruhe, Merkel
effectively quashed an attempt by the right-wing of the party to
impose upper limits — Obergrenzen in German, referred to by the
media as the ‘O-word’ — on refugees.
We will reduce the
number of refugees noticeably — Angela Merkel
A potential revolt
had been building behind the scenes for weeks ahead of the annual
party congress. The German media portrayed it as a showdown.
On one side were the
arch-conservatives from the CDU’s youth branch Junge Union and from
its business wing. Drawing moral support from the CDU’s
traditionally more conservative Bavarian sister party, the Christian
Social Union (CSU), the plan was to submit a motion demanding an
upper limit on refugees at the congress — a direct challenge to
Merkel.
“It’s being said
that if everything remains the way things are now, it will be too
much for Germany,” Carsten Linnemann, head of the CDU’s
conservative business wing, told reporters on Sunday night, before
Monday’s speech.
On the other hand,
the party leader known as Mutti (Mum) was defending the need to grant
refugee to hapless Syrians, and rejecting the notion of a fixed
limit.
“We will reduce
the number of refugees noticeably,” said the chancellor, adding:
“This is in Germany’s and Europe’s interest, and in the
interest of the refugees.”
It sounded bland
enough. But thanks to some agile negotiating on the eve of the
congress on Sunday night, Merkel managed to impose what she portrays
as a principled stand, the conservatives in the CDU felt they had
secured a good compromise, and the entire CDU — which has no clear
successor to Merkel in sight — was relieved that any doubts about
the third-term chancellor’s authority over her party had been
dispelled.
“We did not cling
to terminology — it was all about the cause,” said the
30-year-old head of the Junge Union, Paul Zimiak, implying that he
had got what he wanted.
Merkel blended an
appeal to her audience’s patriotism — saying Germany would rise
to the challenge because it had a vocation “to achieve great
things” — with scorn for the failure of much of the rest of
Europe to accept what Germany considers their fare share of refugees.
This new-found unity
within the CDU will likely mean that the conservative-led government
will put even more pressure on other EU countries to address what
Merkel calls their “lack of solidarity” in dealing with the
refugee crisis, starting with the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels
later this week.
“Sometimes it
makes you want to go mad,” Merkel said in reference to negotiations
with her European partners. “But it’s never been easy in Europe,
never in all of these 10 years that I have so far experienced.”
Authors:
Janosch Delcker
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