Angela
Merkel Must Go
04/16/2016 06:55 am
ET
Daniel Williams
German Chancellor
Angela Merkel should step down. Once Europe’s only forthright and
decisive leader, she has become a groveling embarrassment and a
danger by caving into Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by
letting a possible prosecution of a German comic go ahead in German
courts.
The comedian read a
vulgar poem about Erdogan on ZDF television on March 31. Erdogan sued
under an archaic German law which bans insulting foreign
representatives. But the case could only go ahead with Merkel’s
permission.
She gave it, while
in the same breath saying how she’d like to overturn the law. How
about just not enforcing it.
Only last year,
terrorists killed 11 editors and staff and one policeman at the
Charlie Hebdo magazine offices in Paris, over caricatures of the
Prophet Mohammed. Merkel has now decided that a foreign autocrat can
decide what humor is permissible in her own democratic country. Is
this the same Merkel who stood up to Vladimir Putin over his covert
invasion of Ukraine?
This action follows
numerous blunders by Merkel, who is the leader of European Union’s
political lynchpin and the continent’s biggest economy. First, by
dragging out the Greek debt crisis as it stumbles from non-solution
to non-solution, she weakened not only the Euro currency but the EU
as a whole. Merkel took Greece to task on moral grounds, as if German
banks, for instance, had no idea Greece was a bad loan risk. She,
along with corrupt Greek leaders, consigned Greeks to a generation of
poverty so the bankers would be paid anyway.
Last year, she
opened Germany’s borders to a million migrants on the grounds that
Germany had some sort of moral duty to accept infinite numbers. She
expected the rest of Europe, benumbed by economic recession and
tensions over terrorism, to go along. It didn’t and countries began
to throw up border obstacles. Merkel had to backtrack and begin
deporting refugees as Germans themselves became horrified at the
numbers and began to support Trump-like right wingers.
The immigration
misstep led to a deal with Erdogan. To stop the smuggling, the EU
came up with three billion Euros for Turkey, eventual visa-free
travel for Turks in Europe, and maybe EU membership. All was good.
That is, until a crude German satirist named Jan Böhmermann made fun
of Erdogan on TV.
Turkey is a
polarized country with an ethnic conflict with its Kurdish
population, saddled with Erdogan’s misadventures in supporting
terrorist groups in Syria, and uneasy with Erdogan’s efforts to
expand his executive power at home. So to ease his own refugee
crisis, Erdogan was happy to let smugglers run rampant on Turkey’s
coast, and shuttle migrants off to Greece unless they drowned when
their rickety boats and rafts sank.
Turkey grants either
conditional refugee status, humanitarian residence permit, or
temporary protection to migrants. That means people who qualify for
protection may stay in Turkey for a while but ultimately find a
long-term solution somewhere else. They do not have the ability to
integrate into Turkish society.
Meanwhile, Erdogan
has plenty of experience in oppressing dissidents: raiding media
offices, accusing reporters of being spies, seizing an opposition
newspaper, expelling foreign correspondents. And this guy wants to
get Turkey into the EU!
Of course to offend
the easily-offended Erdogan risked blowing up the deal on refugees.
Would Barack Obama support Merkel if his once favorite Muslim-world
leader decided to evict the US air force from the big Turkish base at
Incirlik? Obama (using a century-old anti-espionage law to hammer
them) is not shy about persecuting whistleblowers who leak stuff to
the press, so who knows?
Europe and the US
have more leverage on Turkey than they seem willing to use, even
minimally. At the least, they could curb quietly trade and tourism if
Erdogan reneged on the refugee deal, and otherwise make it clear that
he doesn’t run Europe. They could just stop pandering.
Is it worth all this
it to defend free speech in Germany? As Merkel herself might have
said in one of her self-righteous moods, European values are at
stake. Germans should find someone else to defend them
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