The incidents in Cologne on New Year’s Eve have finally come home to roost in Germany. Angela Merkel has been feeling the heat of Cologne and Hamburg for a while now and things came to a head when she, at a meeting of party workers, she stated the need to emphasise the fact that the refugees will need to move back to their countries once the terror crises there have been resolved. The timeline on that is not finite but the message certainly was.
There were around 650 cases filed in Cologne and over 150 in Hamburg, as German women were molested by refugee men on December 31. Since then, conservative groups have been threatening to take the government to court. The right wing party has been riding on an anti-refugee agenda. All this doesn’t bode well for her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, who have also joined in the calls for cutting the influx.
Germany took the lead in Europe in welcoming refugees, but now it will need to change its policy. Here Merkel would need to be pragmatic. The Cologne and Hamburg incidents have already shown that blanket acceptance has its drawbacks.
There will have to be border checks, immediate deportation of criminals and a cut on the number of refugees in the country. All this will have to be done to appease the parties calling for change in the policy. In terms of Germany’s politics, this is slowly becoming a majority mandate. If this issue falls in the hands of the far right, the results would literally be catastrophic.
