Germany: Mama Merkel survives for now, but
significantly weakened, by Ann Corcoran 7/3/18.
“Under her continued leadership, Germany will be largely immobilized at home and in Europe.”
It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who has been seen as the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but who has come under intense pressure at home from the far right and from conservatives in her governing coalition over her migration policy.
Ms. Merkel has been unable to stem the changing tide, with cascading implications for politics in Germany and Europe.
To save herself (HER government) she agreed to border controls for
Germany.
Details
are “sketchy,” but she agreed to the creation of transit centers at Germany’s
borders to detain incoming migrants.
The
migrants will be sorted and those who applied for asylum elsewhere in Europe
will be returned to that country. The others??? Will they be deported
immediately? Or, is Germany in for many years of housing migrants in camps?
This New York Times story on what happened yesterday isn’t bad considering the source
and makes the point near the end that Donald Trump is also putting pressure on
Germany to pay-up for their NATO defense protection, or else. The ‘or
else’ could be the removal of more of our military from the German state where
we have tens of thousands of American servicemen stationed.
When President Trump goes to the NATO summit in a week, he will be meeting a
very much weakened German chancellor.
Agreeing
to any sort of border controls is a BFD! One of the founding principles
in the creation of the European Union was the idea of free movement of people
between its participating countries and Angela Merkel was a leading proponent
of that policy.
From
the New
York Times: Merkel, to Survive, Agrees to Border Camps for
Migrants
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel, who staked her legacy on welcoming
hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed on Monday to build
border camps for asylum seekers and to tighten the border with Austria in a
political deal to save her government.
Although
the move to appease the conservatives exposed her growing political weakness,
Ms. Merkel will limp on as chancellor. For how long is unclear. The nationalism
and anti-migrant sentiment that has challenged multilateralism elsewhere in
Europe is taking root — fast — in mainstream German politics.
Ms. Merkel agreed to the latest policy after an insurrection over
migration policy led by her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to
bring down her coalition.
Mr.
Seehofer demanded that Germany block migrants at the border if they have no
papers, or have already registered in another European country.
Ms.
Merkel, who supports free movement across Europe’s borders, has been opposed to
any moves effectively resurrecting border controls until Monday night, when she
made the deal to stay in power.
It would establish camps, called “transit centers,” at points along the
border. Newly arriving migrants would be screened in the centers, and any determined
to have already applied for asylum elsewhere in the European Union would be
turned back.
Turning them back to the countries where they first arrived is going to
cause even more tension between Germany and its neighbors. But, not mentioned here is what about all those who have no
legitimate right to asylum, are they going to ship them right back to Africa or
the Middle East?
Merkel
in the breach—holding back the rise of the right!
The New York Times story briefly refers
to the rape and murder of Maria, a German student, by an Afghan asylum seeker
as the beginning of the change in attitude of the German public about Merkel’s
welcome to migrants in 2015.
Under Ms. Merkel, Germany has been a bulwark against the rise of the
far right in Europe and the increasing turn against migrants. Even as neighboring countries
turned away those fleeing war and strife in the Middle East, she has welcomed more than a million since
2015, and lobbied for a collective European solution.
Anti-migrant
feelings helped lead to the rise of a far-right political party, the
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has put Germany’s more mainstream
parties under pressure to change.
President
Trump should find her less cocky (than he found her in Canada at the recent G7
meeting) when he gets to the NATO summit next week in Brussels.
LOL!
Maybe they can share notes on detention centers! Will German’s separate
the children for instance?
Go
here for my
archive on the ‘Invasion
of Europe.’
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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