Misstep on refugees damaging for Merkel
Chris Mondics is an Inquirer staff writer BERLIN - With its rolling hills, vast empty expanses, and small crossroads towns, often centered on an ancient brick or stone church, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern seems at times to have more in common with the wide open spaces of rural Pennsylvania than it does with the nation's booming employment centers a few hundred miles to the east.
Chris Mondics
is an Inquirer staff writer
BERLIN - With its rolling hills, vast empty expanses, and small crossroads towns, often centered on an ancient brick or stone church, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern seems at times to have more in common with the wide open spaces of rural Pennsylvania than it does with the nation's booming employment centers a few hundred miles to the east.
This ancient hunting ground of Hollenzollern kings is Germany's least populous state, and one of its poorest.
It also now is the scene of Chancellor Angela Merkel's most debilitating election setback. On Sept. 4, voters relegated Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party to third-tier status in the local parliamentary elections, especially humiliating while MeckPomm, as the Germans like to call it, is Merkel's home state and she campaigned hard there.
While Merkel has made no announcement yet as to whether she will attempt to win a fourth term next year, German commentators on the right and the left are casting the CDU loss as a humiliating setback. One poll in May found that just under two-thirds of German voters said Merkel should not run again.
And the right-wing Alternatives for Germany (AFD) party, which supplanted the CDU as the second-ranking party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, is expected to make further gains in elections Sunday for members of the local Berlin parliament.
The root of Merkel's current political crisis is her decision last year to open Germany's borders to a wave of refugees from the Middle East and beyond, now totaling more than a million. There was at first a great outpouring of public support for what many German voters believed was a morally correct decision.
But the numbers surprised policymakers, who seemed ill-prepared for the influx. A mass shooting in Munich this summer by the son of Iranian immigrants, an ax attack by a refugee from Afghanistan on a train, and a suicide bombing, linked to ISIS, outside the gates of a music festival heightened public anxiety.
"When Merkel made her decision on refugee policy, she did it for great humanitarian and moral reasons," said Judy Dempsey, a Berlin-based analyst and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The problem is she had no strategy for how to deal with the refugees. She completely underestimated the task."
Cecilia Bachmann, who runs a small café in a former nobleman's manor in the tiny crossroads town of Neuenkirchen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, perfectly embodies Merkel's political challenge.
Bachmann herself was a refugee in the winter of 1945, driven out of her home in the former German state of Silesia, now part of Poland, so she understands the trauma and tragedy that results from being violently forced from one's homeland. She praised Merkel's generosity, and voiced skepticism the refugees would take jobs from native Germans. But she said the country was overwhelmed by the numbers and preparations had fallen short.
"Much too much," Bachmann said of the refugee influx.
Merkel's main political opposition is the AFD, which began as a movement opposing the European Union and its common currency, the euro. But more and more it has focused on the refugee question and the idea, advanced by the Christian Social Union party, the powerful Bavaria-based partner of the CDU, to place a ceiling on the number.
The AFD is now polling at about 14 percent in national surveys, and like Donald Trump's primary wins earlier this year, is gaining much of its force from growing public concerns about the immigrant influx.
The AFD couches its anti-immigrant ideas in the language of public safety and concerns that the immigrant influx will overburden the German budget. The party also has called for a ban on headscarves, minarets, and other practices central to Muslim belief and identity. But a parallel organization known as Pegida, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, bluntly proclaims that Muslim beliefs are incompatible with Europe. Many of its members openly call for expelling Muslims from Germany.
After a monthlong pause, Pegida began again to hold regular Monday night demonstrations on Sept. 5 in Dresden, a baroque jewel of a city and a stronghold of the right.
The demonstrators were unanimous in declaring that Muslim culture was incompatible with the West. Also prominent was a distinct strain of anti-Americanism, and demonstrators frequently used the derogatory shorthand for Americans, "Amis." Merkel, many said, was simply a tool for U.S. interests.
"She has to go," said Uwe Leonhardt, one of the demonstrators.
Some 500 demonstrators showed up Sept. 5, far fewer than the thousands who regularly attended last year. But for Merkel, the political damage has been done. Her air of political invincibility is mostly gone and some lawmakers are openly voicing discontent. One of those is Wolfgang Bosbach, a conservative member of parliament from North Rhine Westphalia who announced that he would be stepping down in 2017, in part because he could no longer support Merkel's policies.
Bosbach is a well-liked figure among the German press for his ready availability and willingness to speak his mind. In an interview at his offices a block from the historic Reichstag building, he said Germany wasn't ready for the number of refugees that flooded into the country. Bosbach maintains that political leaders have given the AFD an opening by attempting to marginalize those who criticize Merkel's refugee policies, and by failing to make course corrections based on public alarm over the influx.
It is an opening that the AFD has used to good effect.
215-854-5957 @cmondics