The Shrinking Chancellor

Merkel’s under attack over refugees “My patience is at an end,” says a onetime ally

The event should have been a breeze for Angela Merkel. The German chancellor was giving a speech on the importance of funding science at a new physics research center in the eastern city of Halle—no problem for a physicist-turned-politician. But a few minutes into her address, Merkel was confronted by a heckler demanding a change in Germany’s stance on refugees. Though the chancellor kept her cool, thanking the heckler and telling him, “I will stand by my responsibility,” the incident highlights the increasing hostility she faces over her open-door policy on migrants.

After the arrival of 1.1 million refugees in Germany last year, with thousands more showing up every day, Merkel’s leadership is being tested as never before. Convinced that closing borders would bring down Europe’s system of passport-free travel, which Merkel has called the centerpiece of the region’s single market, she has sought to cajole neighbors into taking in more refugees and to persuade Turkey to keep migrants from crossing into the European Union. After simmering throughout the summer and fall, the controversy boiled over in the first week of 2016. Shortly after revelers ushered in the New Year with Champagne and fireworks, scores of women across Germany reported sexual assaults during the festivities. In Cologne, groups of men gathered at the foot of the city’s Gothic cathedral and surrounded women, groping and pickpocketing them. Police said more than 1,000 men, mostly from North Africa and the Middle East, many of them asylum seekers, were at the scene.

Members of Merkel’s coalition government soon stepped up calls for quotas on refugees, deportation of those who commit crimes, and holding facilities for migrants in border zones. German President Joachim Gauck said the country should consider ways to limit the influx. And the sharpest criticism has come from the closest ally of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, Bavaria’s governing Christian Social Union. To shore up support, Merkel made an uprecedented visit to the CSU’s annual retreat at the snowy Alpine resort of Wildbad Kreuth. After lederhosen-clad children presented the chancellor with a bouquet of flowers, 100 delegates angrily told her their communities were buckling under the wave of migrants and demanded a cap on arrivals. When Merkel stood by her refusal to impose a limit, CSU Chairman Horst Seehofer threatened to file a constitutional complaint charging the federal government with failing to control the borders and warned that 2016 could end up topping last year’s record influx of migrants. “My patience is at an