Why can’t she just go?
Angela Merkel has had to cut another humiliating deal to save her chancellorship. She is now toughening the border between Germany and Austria. She will work to build camps outside of Europe where asylum claims can be processed. She was forced to this point by members of her own party. The New York Times report says, “Under Ms. Merkel, Germany has been a bulwark against the rise of the far right in Europe and the increasing turn against migrants.”
This is nearly the opposite of the truth. Merkel’s disguised defense of German financial and political interests within the European Union has exacerbated the rise of left and right wing populism in Italy, and Greece. The bending she is now doing over the internal borders between European Union member states is something she could not manage to do when David Cameron pleaded with her ahead of the Brexit referendum. Her intransigence, her inability to give him a deal to sell ahead of the vote, brought about Brexit, which will deal a serious blow to the finances of the EU and make it more dependent on non-member states for security.
And, of course, there’s the migration issue. In contrast to the stubbornness about the existing EU arrangements she showed with Cameron, on this issue, Merkel, in a splurge of emotion, nullified the Dublin Accords governing migration and asylum issues, and over a million migrants were let into the heart of Europe in a single year. She was praised, stupidly, for “leaving the doors ajar.” We can trace through those open doors many links to the terror attacks across France in 2015 and beyond, and a surge of violent crimes in Germany, including the coordinated sexual assaults in Cologne.
The subsequent waves of migration this “doors ajar” policy encouraged have entrenched the human trafficking crisis in Libya, a business which not-so-subtly colludes with humanitarian NGOs to bring more migrants into Europe. The result is that the populist anti-immigration governments in Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland have seen their ranks swell with Austria and Italy added to their ranks.
Merkel has become the devil-figure that populists run against from Birmingham to Budapest. By her own terms her chancellorship has become a disaster for her principles: the strengthening of the EU, the moral and political leadership of Germany within that Union, and the super-intending orthodoxy of liberal internationalism. Even those who were rooting for her principles should want to see accountability for them.