Merkel’s policies have backfired badly in Germany
AUNITED, powerful Germany has always been a menace to European freedom. It was Teutonic aggression that plunged the continent into two apocalyptic conflicts in the last century. Similarly the EU, that destroyer of prosperity and democracy, owed its creation to the fearful desire of other nations to hold German ambitions in check. In practice, however, the EU has become another vehicle for ruthless German domination.
The Chancellor Angela Merkel, elected in 2005, has followed in the classic tradition of oppression and chaos. Her bullying economic stewardship of the EU, in league with Brussels, has resulted in a relentless cycle of crises, as the supremacy of German interests spreads debt, poverty and unemployment across much of Europe.
Even more catastrophic was her decision in the summer of 2015, following the escalation in the Syrian civil war, to suspend all external border controls and the usual rules on refugees.
The result was the biggest influx of migrants in Europe’s history, with over a million asylum claimants settling in Germany, almost all Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. At a single stroke Merkel had transformed the fabric of Germany while storing up huge problems for Europe.
PREDICTABLY the smug international elite, wedded to their cherished doctrines of globalisation and multiculturalism, praised Merkel as the greatest political heroine of our times. She was described by the BBC as “the humanitarian Iron Lady” and named person of the year by Time magazine, which hailed her “generous, openhearted gesture”.
But the warm glow of politically correct adulation has given way to disillusion as the German people have woken up to the reality of Merkel’s opendoor policy. The price of her self-righteous sanctimony has been a severe one: growing concern about Islamic extremism, rampant anti-Semitism, institutionalised misogyny, social dislocation and huge welfare burdens. It is a bitter irony that Merkel and the German political class thought that they could wash away the sins of their nation’s dark past through this colossal act of virtuesignalling, yet they have ended up importing a new type of ideological brutality.
Ever the ambitious political opportunist, Merkel is now beginning to change her tune in the face of mounting public anger over the consequences of uncontrolled immigration. In September she made a halfhearted confession of guilt about what she had done. “If I could, I would turn the clock back many years,” she said, adding that her government had “to do something for social cohesion”.
Now she has stepped up her rhetoric against multiculturalism much further. In an address this week to her CDU party conference, Merkel proposed a ban on the burka “wherever it is legally possible”.
Sounding just like an opponent of the diversity creed that she once espoused so fervently, she proclaimed that “our law takes precedence over codes of honour, tribal and family rules and over sharia law”.
Well, it is a bit late now. If Merkel genuinely does not want sharia law and the burka in Germany, then why did she so eagerly open the floodgates to more than one million Muslims? Last year Merkel said, “Islam belongs to Germany.” If she really believes that then how can she with any honesty, complain about the burka which – as we know only too
THE biggest threat to the CDU comes from the AfD (Alternative for Germany) movement, led by businesswoman Frauke Petry, whose anti-immigration stance has found increasing resonance with voters. In recent regional elections in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD pushed the CDU into third place, while Petry’s party also gained its first seats in the Berlin state parliament.
The AfD’s rise and Merkel’s decline have been further fuelled by growing violent disorder. Last month in a crime that shocked the nation, Maria Ladenburger, a student and daughter of a senior EU official, was raped and murdered in the town of Freiburg. At the weekend it was reported that a “17-year-old” Afghan asylum seeker had been arrested.
“We wouldn’t have had this victim, and so many others, if our country had been better prepared for the dangers that always go along with massive immigration,” said a representative of the police union. Among those other crimes are the sex assaults by “Arabic-speaking” men in Cologne in January, the attempted beheading of four tourists on a train at Wurzburg by a migrant posing as an Afghan refugee and the Munich massacre by a gunman of Iranian origin.
Having unleashed the dark forces, Merkel cannot now act as the defender of Europe’s culture. Instead of indulging in empty talk about the burka she should face up to the terrible damage she has inflicted and resign.
‘Adulation has given way to disillusion’