ONE MILLION
German asylum claims after Merkel throws open door
NEARLY a million people have applied for asylum in Germany so far this year after Angela Merkel flung open the doors to migrants.
Despite the winter weather, numbers are continuing to soar with a record 206,101 arrivals last month alone, figures reveal.
Germany has already registered 965,000 asylum seekers in 2015, exceeding an official forecast of 800,000 arrivals for the whole year made in August. The total so far is more than four times as many as for all of 2014.
The number of arrivals in November topped the previous high of 181,166 in October.
Half of those seeking refuge claim to be Syrian, according to the figures from the German interior ministry, with 13 per cent saying they are from Afghanistan and 10 per cent from Iraq.
Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, yesterday claimed that despite the record numbers the arrivals had begun to tail off in the past fortnight. ‘We aren’t at a tipping point yet, but it’s a good development,’ he said.
An EU deal at the end of last month to give Turkey £2.1billion in return for slowing the influx has led to more patrols in the Aegean Sea, but smugglers are already using new routes to get around them.
In comparison to Germany, Britain received just over 29,000 asylum applications in the 12 months to September.
‘A drastic reduction’
Even with the burgeoning migration crisis, the figure is only 19 per cent higher than the previous year.
Mrs Merkel faces a growing backlash over her handling of the crisis with nearly half of Germans now wanting the leader, once known as the Iron Chancellor, to stand down.
She had insisted ‘we can do it’ when she welcomed migrants to Germany in August, criticising other states, including Britain, for not doing enough to help.
A poll for Germany’s biggest selling newspaper Bild last month found 48 per cent do not want her to stand for a fourth term as Chancellor at the next elections, due to be held in 2017.
Forty-seven per cent of voters believe she has handled the migrant crisis badly, with 40 per cent thinking she has made the right decisions.
Mrs Merkel’s vulnerability comes amid a dramatic decline in her approval ratings, from 75 per cent in April to less than 50 per cent in recent weeks.
Her decision in August to open Germany’s doors to refugees has created a split at the top of her government, with calls from her own ministers to rein in the influx of people and set a maximum number. Mrs Merkel has been accused of spurring more migrants to come to Europe by allowing all Syrian refugees to seek asylum.
The influx into Germany has stretched the country’s capacity to find housing for migrants and process asylum applications.
Pressure is growing from within her CDU party for her to control the number of people coming in.
The party’s economic council at the weekend urged a ‘drastic reduction of the high number of refugees’. Wolfgang Steiger, the general secretary, warned that Mrs Merkel ‘must finally give a clear message to all those sitting on packed suitcases’ .He said a ceiling for the numbers coming into both Germany and the EU should be set urgently.
Mr Steiger said that by overriding EU rules that refugees should apply for asylum in the first country they arrive in, Mrs Merkel had isolated Germany amongst its European neighbours. ‘Due to the unilateral suspension of the Dublin Agreement, we set ourselves over European law,’ he said.