“We always said that it’s inconceivable for Germany to take in a million people every year”, Gabriel said in an interview on Saturday.
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Frank-Jurgen Weise told the country’s Bild newspaper that 390,000 people applied for asylum protection in the first six months of 2016.
“We can ensure optimal services for up to 300,000”.
He told German magazine Der Spiegel: “Even with the best will in the world, we won’t manage to integrate so many people from totally different cultures”.
German chancellor Angela Merkel stood by her open-door policy towards asylum seekers in an interview on Sunday (28 August) and urged European Union members that have refused to take in people to accept refugees.
In the ZDF interview, Gabriel also criticized Merkel’s catchphrase “Wir schaffen das”, meaning “We can do this”, which she adopted during the migrant crisis last summer and has repeatedly used since.
Almost 1.1 million asylum seekers arrived in Germany, Europe’s top economic power a year ago, putting enormous strain on the country’s bureaucracy to process claims and testing confidence in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s right-left coalition government.
The German Islamophobic movement PEGIDA staged its biggest rally in months yesterday (19 October), reinvigorated on its first anniversary by anger at the government’s decision to take in almost a million refugees from the Middle East.
Weise said Germany would try to get as many of them on the job market as possible. “We’re going to have to keep discussing that”.
Instead of taking in refugees en masse, some eastern European countries want to provide other forms of help – such as border guards for other EU countries – and have suggested that the European Commission could offset those contributions against its proposed distribution quota. “And the economy in Germany is so good, thank god, that we can afford it”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s domestic popularity has declined, a poll showed on Sunday, with 50 percent of Germans against her serving a fourth term in office after a federal election next year.
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“At no time have I said when I want or don’t want” to announce plans to run again, she said in Sunday’s television interview.
