Angela Merkel has a migrant “problem” and here’s what it looks like on paper:
Merkel’s open-door policy to Syrian asylum seekers scored the chancellor some badly needed PR points in the wake of fraught negotiations with Athens during which she and German FinMin Wolfgang Schaeuble were often cast as the miserly villains in Greece’s debt drama.
But enthusiasm for the migrant cause waned in Germany as hundreds of thousands streamed into the country after traversing the so-called “Balkan route”. Lawmakers are divided and the German people are increasingly on edge following the attacks in Paris and the scare in Hannover.
“Suddenly, Europe’s most durable democratic leader faces the most serious political crisis of her decade in office,” E.J. Dionne Jr. writes, in an Op-ed for WaPo. “In opening her country’s borders to what one German official called a ‘biblical march’ of refugees, Merkel called forth a series of paradoxes,” he continues. “On the one hand, Germans are deeply proud of their response to the migrants as tens of thousands mobilized to welcome them, but the initial glow of national pride is now shadowed by doubts and, in many cases, anger [as] more than 1 million refugees are expected to reach Germany, whose population is roughly 82 million.”
