Angela
Merkel’s kinda sorta mea culpa
The
chancellor has won domestic praise for her change of strategy on
migration. Elsewhere, not so much.
By
Florian Eder and
Janosch Delcker
9/20/16,
BERLIN — German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s softening of her rhetoric on migration
has achieved its aim of mollifying her critics and buying her some
time a year ahead of national elections — at home at least.
When it comes to her
critics in the EU, however, there’s nothing that could win them
over — not that the German chancellor was trying.
After Sunday’s
serious setback in elections in Berlin — when Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) saw its support plummet while the
anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) made huge gains — the
chancellor told reporters she would like to “turn back time by
many, many years, so that [she] could better prepare [herself] and
the whole government and all those in positions of responsibility for
the situation that caught us unprepared in the late summer of 2015.”
Summer 2015 was when
she opened Germany’s doors to thousands of migrants.
Merkel’s admission
of misjudgments in dealing with the refugee crisis seemed to be what
the CDU’s Bavarian sister party — one of her biggest critics —
had been waiting for.
Merkel would
rather go back in time to many years before summer 2015, way before
Germany’s “rendezvous with globalization.”
“I see this as a
highly respectable act,” German Agriculture Minister Christian
Schmidt, deputy party chief of the Christian Social Union (CSU), told
the DPA news agency. Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder
acknowledged Merkel’s “change of course,” telling Die Welt
that, “of course, now words must be matched with deeds.”
But Merkel’s
statement on Monday was far from an admission of error. While she
regretted not having the country sufficiently prepared for an influx
of refugees, she stressed that thousands of asylum seekers flocking
to Europe had been inevitable.
Election posters for
political parties including the far-right NPD, Buergerbewegung pro
Deutschland, and AfD in Berlin | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Election posters for
political parties including the far-right NPD, Buergerbewegung pro
Deutschland, and AfD in Berlin | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
The underlying
message? Merkel does not regret any of her major decisions in dealing
with the refugee crisis. Instead, she would rather go back in time to
many years before summer 2015, way before Germany’s “rendezvous
with globalization.”
It was Merkel’s
finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who coined that term, elevating
shortcomings in managing the refugee crisis by local and national
authorities to a global level.
“The state of the
EU in general and particularly the refugee crisis is not good at
all,” Merkel said on Monday. “In Europe, we still don’t have a
common understanding to acknowledge the flight of so many people for
what it actually is, a global and moral challenge…It weighs on me,
too, that we haven’t succeeded in that.”
She acknowledged
that for many years, the EU’s Dublin regulation — under which
refugees must register for asylum in the EU country through which
they entered the bloc — placed the burden of migration on those
countries with EU external borders, such as Greece and Italy;
“keeping the problem at arm’s length” for Germany.
The main difference
between Merkel and her most vocal critic among EU leaders, Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is that Merkel wants to change the
Dublin system, sharing responsibility for refugees among countries.
Orbán does not.
The Hungarian sent
his spokesman Zoltán Kovács to Brussels on Monday to explain the
country’s position.
“We are not going
to take responsibilities for the shortcomings of other countries,”
Kovács said, referring to Greece’s problems securing its borders
as well as to a German leader who “didn’t consult us” before
opening the borders.
Nothing annoyed
Merkel’s opponents (and some allies) more than her decision last
August to temporarily open the border to refugees; shortly after, in
September 2015, the CSU invited Orbán to a party conference, which
was followed by a volley of CSU attacks directed at Merkel, with
party chief Horst Seehofer describing her policy as a “rule of
unlawfulness.”
Seehofer was in a
friendlier mood after Merkel’s speech on Monday, saying “it’s
high time that we find common ground to pass next year’s national
elections.”
The conservatives
will need to be singing from the same hymn sheet ahead of the vote,
in the fall of 2017. Merkel is widely predicted to be running for
chancellor again, although she hasn’t made that official, saying
only that she will address the matter “in due time.”
If the AfD has
its way, election debates will focus on refugees and the chancellor’s
error in letting them in.
In December, her
Christian Democrats hold an annual party summit — that’s when
Merkel is likely to throw her hat into the ring.
It won’t be an
easy contest for the CDU/CSU. The rise of the AfD has been meteoric.
Founded just three years ago, the AfD now has seats in 10 of the 16
German state assemblies. It took over 14 percent of votes cast in the
capital on Sunday and is on course to enter the Bundestag, or lower
house of parliament, in next year’s election.
If the AfD has its
way, election debates will focus on refugees and the chancellor’s
error in letting them in.
It’s helped that
Merkel has renounced her year-old mantra “We can do it” — her
defiant response to those who doubted the country could cope with the
influx of refugees.
“The sentence is
part of my political work, it’s the expression of its stance and
its aim,” Merkel said. “Much has been interpreted into this …
sentence. So much that I hardly want to repeat it,” she said,
adding that it had been widely misunderstood and turned into an
“empty phrase.”
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