As German Chancellor Angela Merkel doubles down on her open-border policy just days after the deadly Paris terror attacks by reiterating her government’s willingness to absorb more migrants, the political landscape in changing rapidly before her eyes. The anti-immigration party AfD that was just above 3 percent in opinion polls as recently as August, is now polling above 10 percent.
Established in 2013 as a grassroots reaction to the EU’s monetary policy, the party has skyrocketed to the country’s third largest political force. AfD (Alternative for Germany) has aligned itself with the anti-Islamisation movement ‘Pegida’, drawing impressive crowds to its rallies, especially in the eastern part of the country.
Chancellor Merkel, who made a successful academic career in communist East Germany, allegedly even holding the position of Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda “Agitpop” at the communist youth movement (FDJ) before she joined the West German Christian Democratic Party after the German Unification in 1990, is today ideologically committed to the open-borders policy despite her nose-diving popularity at home:
Merkel’s stance in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks underscores her willingness to court political risk and resist pressure within and outside her party bloc to close Germany’s borders. Amid speculation that one of the suicide bombers entered the European Union as a refugee, Merkel has said that asylum seekers shouldn’t have to bear the blame for last week’s attacks.“We’re a strong country, we’re a prosperous society and we have the strength to help,” she told a conference on integration Tuesday in Berlin. “We should not only talk about the burdens that this challenge brings to us, but also the opportunity.”As Merkel pursues international diplomacy to try to curb the flow of refugees, support for her Christian Democratic Union rose 1 percentage point to 35 percent in an INSA poll for Bild newspaper. Even so, the Alternative for Germany party, which wants to curb immigration, gained for the second consecutive week, polling 10.5 percent. [Bloomberg Business]
The ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris were followed by a series of bomb alerts and police raids targeting suspected Islamist cells across Germany. On November 17, German authorities called off a soccer match between Germany and Netherlands in Hanover after receiving a tip from French police of a Paris-style terror plot. Police in major German cities are now beefing up their presence ahead of as traditional Christmas markets due to open soon.
In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris, Germany’s political class still remains firmly in denial about the threat of rising Islamism in the country and Europe as a whole. Their ideological commitment trumps the hard facts on the ground. Police investigations in Paris have again confirmed everyone’s worst fears—that the Islamic State is using refugee routes to sneak in operatives capable of carrying out terrorist operations on European soil [reported by Legal Insurrection on November 09, 2015]. The rise of the AfD party is a direct result of the reluctance shown by mainstream German political parties to address the genuine concerns of their citizens amid spiralling migrant crisis.
Merkel has already announced her intentions to run for a fourth term in the 2017 German parliamentary elections. Despite Merkel’s dipping poll numbers, there is hardly any political rival within her Christian Democratic Party to challenge her candidacy. Even if the outcome of the 2017 elections remains wide open, Merkel’s policy of mass-immigration is poised to “fundamentally transform” the Christian demography of Germany and Europe with a few short years.
(Cover image courtesy VICE News, YouTube)
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