Courtesy of Mish.
Backlash against sheer stupidity is starting to build.
I am talking about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to ramrod an agreement that requires EU countries to accept more alleged refugees than many countries want, and even Germany itself can handle.
The backlash has finally hit Germany in a big way as was easily predictable months ago.
German citizens who once welcomed refugees now complain ‘We’re Under Water’.
Hesepe, a village of 2,500 that comprises one district of the small town of Bramsche in the state of Lower Saxony, is now hosting some 4,000 asylum-seekers, making it a symbol of Germany’s refugee crisis. Locals are still showing a great willingness to help, but the sheer number of refugees is testing them. The German states have reported some 409,000 new arrivals between Sept. 5 and Oct. 15 — more than ever before in a comparable time period — though it remains unclear how many of those include people who have been registered twice.
Six weeks after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s historic decision to open Germany’s borders, there is a shortage of basic supplies in many places in this prosperous nation. Cots, portable housing containers and chemical toilets are largely sold out. There is a shortage of German teachers, social workers and administrative judges. Authorities in many towns are worried about the approaching winter, because thousands of asylum-seekers are still sleeping in tents.
But what Germany lacks more than anything is a plan to make Merkel’s two most-pronounced statements on the crisis — “We can do it” and “We cannot close our borders” — fit together. In the second month of what has been dubbed the country’s brand new “Welcoming Culture,” it has become clear to many that Germany will only be able to cope if the number of refugees drops.
Merkel’s last hope is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president. The chancellor is visiting Ankara this weekend, bringing with her a number of gifts that Europe’s leaders had discussed in their summit in Brussels. The plan is to persuade Erdogan to strengthen the border in the Aegean Sea that “the strong nation of Germany” (as Merkel put it) is unable to.
Merkel Increasingly Isolated
The griping over Merkel’s policies has grown louder within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The meetings of the party’s parliamentary group, which for many years radiated the boredom of an English gentleman’s club, now resemble tribunals against the chancellor. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the strong man in Merkel’s cabinet, also expressed his own dissatisfaction, in distant Peru, by cracking jokes about border controls in the former East Germany.
Merkel is looking increasingly isolated. Government sources say she has made refugee policy her personal concern, and now she is being left to deal with it on her own. Last week, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière confided in his Luxembourg counterpart, telling him that Merkel did not have a plan, only “cold feet.”
Ralph Tiesler, deputy head of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), had to get to grips with a real emergency situation: Tiesler is the man who distributes the refugees across Germany, the lord of the buses and trains. …