Merkel, May, Erdogan and the Migrant Crisis

On Monday, the Guardian called Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) drubbing by the the Social Democrats (SPD) and the rightwing populists Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) "a sobering defeat in regional elections in her constituency of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern." Earlier this year, the CDU had looked like the party likely to be voted to form the next government in the state. For the past 10 years, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Merkel's home constituency, has been governed in a “grand coalition” between the SPD and CDU, the same coalition that governs with Merkel as Chancellor at Germany's federal level. But, on Sunday, the center-left SPD got 30.5% of the vote, the anti-immigration AfD got 20.9%, and Chancellor Merkel’s centre-right CDU suffered its all-time lowest result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with 19%. It was not only Merkel's conservative CDU that lost on Sunday. Leftwing parties in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern also saw considerable losses -- the Left party won 13.2%, down from 18.4% five years ago, and the pro-environment Greens won 4.9%, down from 8.7%. And, even the far-right National Democratic party (NPD), which has been represented in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern parliament for the last 10 years, fell beneath the 5% threshold for the first time in a decade, on 3.1% and will not have seats in the parliament. ~~~~~~ AfD continued its remarkable streak of electoral victories in regional elections. Three years after being founded on an anti-Euro ticket in 2013, it is now represented in nine German state parliaments. Its co-leader, Frauke Petry, described Sunday’s result as a blow to Angela Merkel : "Now it is our responsibility to make politics for the people. The people no longer trust the old establishment parties to do so." ~~~~~~ Chancellor Merkel has driven her CDU down in the polls and has suffered several local election defeats since she began her increasingly divisive strategy of taking in 1 million refugees during last year's refugee crisis. Her policy has encouraged support for AfD – led in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern by Leif-Erik Holm, a radio presenter based in Berlin’s multicultural Prenzlauer Berg district. What is surprising is that Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has been largely insulated from the refugee crisis. As the Guardian points out, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the northernmost of the five former East German states that joined with the West German federal republic in 1990. It has experienced industrial decline and a falling population, but in 2015, it had its lowest unemployment rate and highest GDP since reunification. The state split its vote, with the higher-income western area close to affluent Hamburg voting SPD, and the poorer east voting AfD. In part due to its economic weakness and low population density, the region was assigned fewer refugees than all but two of Germany’s 16 other states -- 23,080 asylum seekers were registered in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 2015, a quarter of those assigned to similarly sized but affluent Hesse, the state where Frankfurt is located. Only 3.7% of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s population is non-German, one of the lowest rates in the country. And, while theft, violent crime and sexual assaults have increased in Germany in the last year, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has had no serious criminal incidents, such as terrorist attacks or rape, carried out by asylum seekers, and has seen a decline in theft and violent crime. Police in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern recorded just seven incidents of attempted arson at refugee shelters in 2015. ~~~~~~ But, a shooting rampage in Munich and two attacks with an Islamist motive in regional towns in Bavaria in July have heightened the German debate about internal security. On Sunday night, CDU candidate Lorenz Caffier said : “There was only one subject during the campaign, and that subject was the refugee policy. The refugee question was decisive.” Caffier ruled out resigning and said he hopes his CDU party will be able to continue to form Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s coalition government with the SPD. Caffier was one of the politicians behind a call for a ban on the full face veil in Germany last month. Peter Tauber, the CDU’s general secretary, described the outcome as : “a bitter result, a new experience. We are all responsible for this. It was noticeable that the refugee subject was very present. Of course, many people are looking at Angela Merkel.” The Guardian noted that the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election came a year to the day after Merkel’s government accepted thousands of refugees stranded at Budapest train station. In May, a pig’s head carrying an insulting message was left outside Merkel’s constituency office in the Baltic Sea town of Stralsund, where she has won a direct mandate to serve in the federal parliament since 1990. AfD candidate Holm spoke proudly : “The icing on the cake is that we have left Merkel’s CDU behind us. Maybe that is the beginning of the end of Merkel’s time as chancellor.” Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, told the media : “People will see this as the start of the ‘Kanzlerdämmerung’ [twilight of the chancellor -- the word surely deliberately chosen to recall Wagner's Gotterdämmerung, "The Twilight of the Gods"]. If many CDU members start seeing this defeat as Merkel’s fault, and members of parliament start seeing her as a danger for the party and their own jobs, the whole situation could escalate out of control.” ~~~~~~ German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel -- head of the SPD in Merkel's governing coalition, and widely rumored, despite his denials, to be preparing to challenge her leadership in the 2017 federal elections -- said in an interview on Saturday that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives had “underestimated” the challenge of integrating record numbers of migrants. More than a million migrants poured into Germany from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere last year. Concerns about how to integrate them all into German society and the labor market are at a peak and support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has grown. Gabriel said : “I, we always said that it’s inconceivable for Germany to take in a million people every year.” But, Merkel has estimated that Germany will take in another 300,000 refugees this year. The German labor office research institute says 16,000 are now arriving each month, compared with more than 200,000 last November. Gabriel also criticized Merkel’s slogan “Wir schaffen das” [“We can do this”], which she adopted during the migrant crisis in 2015 and has continued to use. For example, she used the phrase at a news conference in late July after a series of attacks on civilians in Germany, including two claimed by ISIS, that have revealed the flaws her open-door migrant policy, and cost her considerable support among German voters. Gabriel said repeating that phrase was not enough and the CDU needed to create the conditions for Germany to be able to cope, adding that the conservative CDU [led by the Bavarian arm of the CDU] had always blocked opportunities to do that. ~~~~~~ As late as mid-August, Merkel was insisting that refugees had not brought terrorism to Germany, and that Islam belongs in the country as long as it is practised in a way that respects the German constitution : “We have said clearly that an Islam that works and lives on the basis of the constitution ... belongs to Germany," adding that the kind of Islam that rejects the constitution or refuses to accept equal rights for women has no place in Germany. But, the welcome for the million "refugees" has dissipated after this summer's violent attacks on civilians, including three carried out by migrants. Two of the attacks were claimed by ISIS. Merkel's response is clear. In a campaign rally for her CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern ahead of Sunday's election, she said : “The phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, of Islamic State, is not a phenomenon that came to us with the refugees.” She said many people have travelled from Germany to Syria for training with Islamist militants. In June, the country’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said more than 800 were believed to have gone to Syria and Iraq. Merkel suggested the violence was a result of these Germans coming home : “This group has worried us for several years.” While Merkel refuses to accept the fear of refugees growing in Germany, trying to use her version of events to counter the fear, 52% of Germans do not approve of her migration policy, a poll last week. And, it is the rapid influx of migrants, many of whom are Moslem, that has boosted support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD). ~~~~~~ In fact, Chancellor Merkel -- who largely created the refugee/migrant crisis in the EU -- may have added to the impetus in the UK for its Brexit vote to leave the EU. But, Merkel is not the only European leader wrestling with the problem. British Prime Minister Theresa May, at a Monday news conference after the closing of G20 Summit in China, said she wants a new system to give the government control over who is able to enter the country after it leaves the European Union, rather than a points-based system that selects candidates based on criteria, according to Reuters : "What the British people voted for on the 23rd of June was to bring some control into the movement of people from the European Union to the UK....A points-based system does not give you that control." May recalled how staff at Heathrow airport had told her that migrants were able to abuse student visa rules when they applied to come to Britain : "But because they met the criteria, they were automatically let in. That's the problem with a points-based system. I want a system where the government is able to decide who comes into the country. I think that's what the British people want." Prime Minister May is facing a UK electorate that voted to tightly control immigration, while she is trying to resolve problems at the business and trade levels that many UK trading partners -- notably Japan at the G20 -- say will require an open border between the UK and the EU. If that sounds like a lose-lose proposition for Theresa May, it may well turn out to be just that. However, she was elected Conservative Party leader and PM after David Cameron's disappointing resignation because of confidence in her political skills. She began her perilous effort in China by rejecting G20 calls for her capitulation to their demands. The jury is still outon Theresa May -- a long way out. ~~~~~~ At the same G20 meeting, according to Reuters, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he had urged world powers to set up a "safe zone" in Syria, providing displaced Syrians with an area free from fighting, which would help stem the flow of migrants. Erdogan said he has called specifically for a "no-fly zone" in talks with the Russian and US leaders. Reuters reported that the Turkish president has said the Turkish offensive in Syria aims to drive ISIS away from its border and ensure the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia does not expand in the area. Turkey labels both ISIS and the YPG are terrorist organizations. ~~~~~~ Dear readers, while Theresa May has the road to a resolution of the immigration problem ahead of her, Chancellor Merkel seems to have lost her bid to solve the EU immigration issue by her policy of opening borders to all who can prove their "refugee" status, as opposed to being economic migrants. One wonders how she can be re-elected in 2017. As de facto head of the EU, Merkel tried to impose refugee quotas on her EU partner states. That failed so she turned to Turkey and promised to pay 6 billion Euros to Erdogan's government if it would stop and hold all migrants crossing into Turkey on their way to Greece or the Balkans. That deal has also not had universal EU support, leaving Greece deep in the mire of refugees it cannot afford, and Erdogan is threatening to open the migrant flood gates if he is not paid. European Council President Donald Tusk delivered a stark message to world leaders at the G20 summit : Europe is 'close to the limits' of its ability to accept waves of refugees and economic migrants. Tusk's comments will fuel the raging arguments within the EU over how to deal with the huge movements of people displaced by war and poverty. Donald Trump has repeatedly called for building refugee centers in the Middle East, especially northern Syria, with the rich Gulf Arab states paying a major part of the cost, but President Obama and Hillary Clinton have said that is not possible -- adding "it is not who we are," the infuriatingly simplistic and, I suspect deliberately, wrongheaded explanation of what American immigration policy has traditionally been. Now, at the G20 meeting, Turkey's Erdogan has called for a no-fly zone and safe areas for refugees in northern Syria. Erdogan is right. As long as refugees are not cared for near their homes and in their own cultures in the Middle East, with the chance to rebuild their countries if and when the Middle East ends its fratricidal conflicts, Europe will be inundated with unmanageable numbers of refugees and economic migrants who can neither be cared for nor assimilated culturally. Islam does not belong in Europe, any more than it belongs in the UK or the US. It is culturally and governmentally incompatable with western values. This means that Europe and America will have to rescue and find homes for Middle East Christians before they are exterminated. That is a salvageable situation that we must step up to. And if -- IF -- Islam ever comes to grips with the fact that it is a religion stuck in the Middle Ages and adjusts its tenets to fit into the 21st century's social, governmental and human rights norms, then we can begin a discussion about living peacefully together. Until then, forget assimilation. It will not work.