Merkel backs full-face veil ban
German Chancellor also said she’ll protect country from future mass asylum seekers
Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a ban on full-face veils and said she’ll protect Germany against future refugee waves, reaching out to critics of her liberal migration policy as she asked a convention of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to back her bid for a fourth term.
CDU delegates erupted in applause and cheers Tuesday after Merkel gave her strongest backing yet to a ban on clothing such as the burka or niqab worn by Muslim women. At the same time, she said she wants Germany to be a tolerant, diverse country that’s open to the world, including the global economy, and compassionate to people truly in need of shelter.
“We show our faces,” Merkel said in her 80-minute speech to the annual party convention in the western city of Essen. “Full-face covering is not appropriate with us — it should be banned.”
She also said the mass influx of asylum seekers such as the estimated 890,000 who entered the country in 2015 “should never be repeated.”
After more than a year in which the chancellor has faced unprecedented criticism for her open-borders position on refugees, Merkel told delegates she had thought hard about whether to run again and it wasn’t “a trivial decision.” With federal elections due next fall, she positioned herself and her party as pillars of stability in a region buffeted by a rise in populist movements aiming to displace established parties.
“The world hasn’t become stronger in 2016, but weaker and less certain,” Merkel said.
Among those targeted for criticism by the chancellor were financial markets and “big corporations” that seek to minimize their taxes, whose practices she said breed cynicism and have “nothing to do with a social market economy.”
A group of CDU officials last summer put pressure on Merkel to adopt language calling for a ban on veils that cover a woman’s face and body. After a debate in the party about the legal feasibility of a ban, a compromise called for bans in certain public places.
Merkel’s call for a ban “was something our delegates wanted to hear,” Jens Spahn, a deputy finance minister and member of the CDU’s national leadership, said in an inter- view. “It was very clear that we don’t want full veils here in Germany.”
Merkel’s speech put her publicly in line with the full party leadership’s draft resolution for the convention, which says: “We reject full covering. We want to ban it using all legal possibilities, just as we do for underage marriage.”
While the CDU leads in all national polls, Merkel is facing some of the strongest headwinds of her11years in power as she seeks a fourth term.
Merkel, 62, ran unopposed in Tuesday’s ballot by about 1,000 convention delegates to re-elect her as party chairwoman, just over two weeks after she declared her bid to stay on as chancellor.
As expected, delegates overwhelmingly voted to re-elect Merkel, but by asmaller margin than the last leadership vote, which was nearly unanimous. With no obvious successor in her party and international standing built up over a decade, Merkel still has political capital.
That didn’t prevent several critics from taking the convention floor to criticize her for driving voters to the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.
“A big segment of core voters have been put off,” said party member Christine Arlt-Palmer. “This is terrain that we won’t win back.”