SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Germany could hold new elections if Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union fails to form a stable coalition government:
The breakdown of the coalition talks last weekend has done more than dent Ms. Merkel's seeming invulnerability and raise the prospect of new elections, analysts say. Although the Social Democrats agreed on Friday to meet with the chancellor's party next week — raising hopes for, if not a coalition, then a tolerated minority government — the current situation may well signal the breakdown of Germany's postwar tradition of consensus and the dawn of a messy and potentially unnerving politics.
"The distinctive political tradition of the Federal Republic of Germany is change through consensus," said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at the University of Oxford. That was what was at stake, he said. "It hasn't worked so far this time."
The leader of the Social Democrats has said that the party's members would have to vote on joining a coalition led by Merkel.
Also at DW (alternate), BBC, The Hill, and NYT (11/20 editorial).
Related: Germany's jubilant far-right has Merkel in its sights
(Score: 3, Informative) by bd on Saturday November 25 2017, @01:40PM (5 children)
As much as I hate Chancellor Merkels politics, your analogy, as well as your grasp on what happens in Germany, frankly sucks. To use an analogy of my own, it is basically equivalent in verity to me saying that Trump is proof Americans are stupid and literally voted for Hitler.
So, why is your analogy wrong?
It was not Germany that didn't enforce its borders, it was Greece.
Once the balkans route was established and popular in the Syrian refugee community, the great migration was basically bound to happen.
Making it legal made it possible to actually formally process these illegal arrivals. This enabled us to check their background stories, like checking wether the accent they speak matches their place of origin, whether they know places and people in the cities they come from, whether their passports are genuine etc.
What happened has happened many times in the past, albeit at a smaller scale. People who come from actual war-torn countries are granted a place to stay here until their country is deemed safe again, and are repatriated after the fact. Typically a minority is successful in their life here and will be allowed to stay after that. This has happened with Kosovo-Albanians during the Kosovo conflict, South Vietnamese and many others.
Those who are economic migrants are actually repatriated. This is what happens with Afghans right now, as ironically Afghanistan is deemed a safe place of origin.
There used to be a lot of loopholes for economic migrants that were only considered a nuisance in the past. Due to the massive immigration happening, those are being closed.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:01PM (2 children)
So, how did mass migration work out for the native North Americans? Or, the native Australians?
Mass immigration is death for the existing culture, and we have plenty of examples in history to point to. Where are the people who lived in Europe before you round headed pale skinned people moved in? There are some theories that you ate them, other theories that you interbred with them to some limited extent, and yet other theories that you just murdered them, and left them for the animals to eat. Whatever it was - they're all gone. Well, except for maybe Denosovan man - he can still be found on the fringes of the arctic circle. I guess you Euros couldn't catch them before they got away.
(Score: 2) by bd on Monday November 27 2017, @04:10AM (1 child)
Refugees are not migrants.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 27 2017, @10:41AM
I might ask you to explain - - -
History is full of people migrating from one place, to another. Here in the US, the Apache, among others, migrated from one place to another, under pressure from rival tribes. Their (oral) history didn't start in the southwest, near the Mexican border. They moved there from Colorado and Kansas, I believer. (I'd have to do a search for accuracy, but that's close enough for my purpose here.) They weren't viewed as "refugees", nor do I think that they would have described themselves as refugees, or victims. There was pressure that they couldn't stand up to, so they moved southward, where there was less pressure. They "migrated" into the lands where the Spanish and Anglos eventually found them.
There are any number of accounts of migrant people in European history. Germanic tribes, Turkic tribes, and more. Always, they are described as migrating from one place to another. Most certainly, there were pressures pushing them along, but they were migrants.
Today's "refugees" are no different. There's a war at home, they are unable or unwilling to fight that war, so they migrate elsewhere.
And, today's Europeans put up no resistance. Unless they get some backbone, the Euros will be overwhelmed. Then, it will be "Goodby, Western culture!!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:41PM (1 child)
Obviously, I disagree with you. Sure, Greece (and Italy and Spain) are immediately at fault for failing to secure their borders. However, Merkel pretty much led the European politics into providing the migrants with a goal: a place they could expect to stay. Had the initial migrants been caught and expelled, the movement would never have gathered momentum.
Want to stop people drowning in the Mediterranean? End the incentive to try to cross. Turn the boats around. When you rescue people at sea, return them to the coast they left from. They climb over a fence? Open the gate, and shove them back to the other side. Immigration by invitation, not by invasion.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by bd on Monday November 27 2017, @04:05AM
Of course, it is OK for you to disagree. I just read your point of view from a lot of Americans and UK citizens and am a bit tired of arguing about it. So, sorry for the wall of text.
I guess the main point of disagreement is that you think her invitation started the whole mess.
Or that refugees are migrants. You do realise that Syrians fall into the former category?
Here is a run down on why I think Merkel couldn't have reacted differently:
Immigration law in the EU is in dire need of reform, but there is no political will from the majority of member states who do not suffer the consequences.
There is a huge refugee population in the middle east. They live in dire conditions. At least the Syrians among them came from a relatively wealthy country that was suddenly ravaged by war. At the beginning of the crisis, they had the economic means to travel to Europe using relatively expensive illegal smugglers. Many of them were also able to pay for hideouts. A typical Syrian refugee had already paid roughly 9000€ just for the smuggling to Germany.
Germany was just one of several countries that refugees tried to get to due to local legal systems. Sweden and England were other targets.
Funny enough, the increase in refugees had started in 2012, doubling every year and was already well underway when Merkel (an anti-immigration hardliner) changed her opinion and let Syrians apply for protected status ignoring EU rules in the summer of 2015. The numbers increased even more after her announcement, but it was not such a dramatic shift in increase per time unit. Looking at the trend of the preceding years, in the most extreme case, I would guess that the number of refugees in 2016 was twice of what it otherwise would have been.
Why did she give the order to accept applications?
As much as I disagree with her politically, she has an acute sense for public opinion. Letting the immigrants die in the streets of Budapest just to make a point would have meant even more backlash than her pro-asylum stance. But there were practical reasons as well.
According to the EU Dublin-III agreement, Germany was only within its rights to send all the refugees they found back to Greece, as that was the place they entered the EU. Greece would then have to take care of them. If they did so, Greece would have collapsed. If they didn't, they would just come back.
Why would they come back? If they stay illegally for a defined timespan (up to 18 months), Dublin-III makes their asylum process the responsibility of Germany again. The asylum process is protected by the constitution, and there is a good likelyhood that it has to be granted in the case of Syrians (There was only a 30% rejection rate in 2016).
The result would have been at least several hundreds of thousands of people trying to stay under the radar in Germany. Amongst those, there would be potentially a hundred terrorists. If they are granted the ability to apply for asylum, those terrorists can either be vetted by the security agencies if they apply for the process, or are more obvious as they are part of only a relatively small population of people living here illegally.
Terror attacks were bound to happen either way, but the political implications would have been severe if those guys managed to hide more efficiently because Germany was too stubborn with the rules to at least take a look at those new arrivals.
This crisis created a very high number of refugees in a short amount of time, but not an unheard of one. It was roughly the same number of people as those that came here during the Bosnian Wars, but in shorter a shorter timeframe. The necessity to act enabled political majorities for changes in the asylum process that make it quick and efficient in repatriating those who don't have asylum.
So, who says the refugees will stay in Germany after Syria has been declared safe again, like Afghanistan?
In the end, Merkel achieved her goal of tougher immigration laws and no giant illegal population. As a bonus, the intelligence agencies get massive amounts of asylum application interviews while such information still contains useful leads.