She then goes on to acknowledge that the Schengen border area, where passports are not required, also should have had some sort of protection applied to it.
Advertisement
European Union border agency Frontex detected over 1.83 million illegal border crossings in 2015, in contrast to some 283,000 in 2014.
“If you asked me before if I would introduce a distinctive phrase that would be quoted many times over, I would not have thought of this phrase”, she said.
Turkey, angered by a parliamentary resolution branding a 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide, has blocked German lawmakers from visiting 250 German soldiers at Incirlik Air Base, where they are supporting the USA -led fight against Islamic State.
Merkel said in an interview with the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung published Wednesday that her mantra ” which she has used repeatedly since coining it on August 31 previous year and which has divided opinion in Germany ” remains “the right motif for this task”.
While Merkel declared her candidacy for chancellor two years before Germany’s last parliamentary election in 2013, she has yet to announce whether she will run in next year’s federal election.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi pat Leo, the black Labrador retriever who helped pull out 4-year-old Giorgia Rinaldo from under the rubble of the town of Pescara del Tronto following an quake that ravaged central Italy on Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016, in Maranello, Italy, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. “That’s what this is about”.
Merkel, who usually seeks European consensus, had made a decision to “go it alone” – according to the front cover of this week’s Stern news magazine – by suspending the Dublin rules that say refugees must seek asylum in the first EU country they enter.
But Mrs Merkel insisted she will not back down on the policy, launched a year ago after other countries such as Hungary and Poland refused to accept migrants.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls later declared that Merkel’s policy was “untenable in the long term”.
Countries that had looked to German leadership during the eurozone debt crisis would largely ignore Berlin’s demands for them to share the refugee burden under a binding quota system. By the end of 2015, a million migrants had entered the country.
As a result, Merkel is now more “isolated in Europe”, he said, adding that the crisis was “not without effect” on the Brexit campaign.
This is due in part to the closure of the Balkan Route across Eastern Europe, and to the EU’s controversial migrant deal with Turkey, which Mrs Merkel personally negotiated.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands more have arrived this year, and Germany has witnessed a sharp rise in racist hate crimes and xenophobic sentiment, heightened by several bloody jihadist attacks this summer. She also called for more development aid to those nations.
This week Mrs Merkel faces humiliating defeat in regional elections in her home state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Advertisement
To her fans, this remains her biggest strength.
