UK Edition
Angela Merkel on Monday signalled for the first time that she was prepared to change her controversial refugee policy in the wake of heavy losses to the resurgent far-Right in regional elections.
“If I knew what change in refugee policy the people in Germany want, I would be prepared to consider it,” Mrs Merkel said.
“If I could, I would go back in time to be better prepared for the refugee crisis in 2015, for which we were rather unprepared.”
Mrs Merkel was speaking at a specially arranged press conference to address her Christian Democrat (CDU) party’s disastrous performance in Berlin state elections at the weekend.
“I take responsibility as party leader and chancellor,” she said, describing the results as “bitter”.
The CDU slipped to its worst ever showing in the German capital, with just 17.6 per cent.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won the highest share of the vote for the far-Right since the Second World War, with 14.5 per cent.
Mrs Merkel said she would not repeat her earlier slogan in the migrant crisis of “We can do it” because it had become “an empty phrase”.
It was the first time she has indicated she is prepared to back down from her “open-door” refugee policy, which has seen the CDU fall to its lowest level in the national polls for four years, and her personal approval ratings plummet.
The chancellor reacted defiantly to previous losses in regional elections, but in a sign of how seriously she is taking the Berlin results, cancelled plans to attend the UN General Assembly in New York in favour of Monday’s press conference.
With just a year to go before national elections, Mrs Merkel is still refusing to say whether she will stand for a historic fourth term as chancellor.
But it is clear that Mrs Merkel feels she can no longer allow her party to go on suffering defeats at the hands of the far-Right.
During her more than 10 years in power in Germany, Mrs Merkel has repeatedly shown that no position is non-negotiable and she is prepared to change course if necessary - most notably when she made a U-turn over her unpopular support for nuclear energy before 2013’s elections.
Until now, she has remained immovable over her refugee policy. But at Monday’s press conference she indicated she is prepared to shift her position.
But she also made it clear she is not prepared to back down completely.
“If people don’t want Muslim asylum-seekers purely because of their religion, that is contrary to our party principles and to Germany’s,” she said. “The CDU and I cannot go along with that.”
The election results in Berlin came just two weeks after similar losses in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and her allies are demanding action.
“This is the second massive wake-up call in two weeks,” Markus Söder of her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) said.
“It is high time we find common ground to survive at the next election,” Horst Seehofer, the CSU party leader, said, adding that the sister parties faced “the most difficult position we have ever been in”.
One problem for Mrs Merkel is that any changes she makes to her refugee policy will be largely cosmetic at this point.
As Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper noted, she is “being punished for alleged refugee-friendly policies she ended long ago in reality”. The number of asylum-seekers entering Germany has fallen to a trickle this year, following the closure of the so-called Balkan route and the EU’s migrant deal with Turkey.
Commentators have also pointed out that there was more to the CDU’s poor showing in the Berlin elections than her refugee policy. The German capital has serious administrative problems, with residents facing waits of several months for routine procedures such as reporting a lost driving license.
But it is the rise of the AfD which has dominated the headlines and unnerved Mrs Merkel’s allies.
The party now holds the far-Right’s first seats in the Berlin state parliament since the 1990 reunification of Germany, and its councillors will have direct influence over refugee policy.