German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday rebuffed calls to reverse her welcoming stance toward refugees in the wake of a series of brutal attacks in the country.
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“We will have to redouble efforts to deport people”, she said.
Earlier in the year, Angela Merkel had seen her poll ratings slide – but compared with most other leaders, they remained remarkably strong. “We stand decisively against that”, she added.
Germany owes that not just to victims and relatives and other Germans, but also to other refugees, she said. “We need an early warning system so that authorities can act as soon as as.it turns out there is some radicalization”.
At the same time, she said Germany must improve the process for repatriation of migrants whose asylum applications had been rejected.
“We have already achieved very, very much in the last 11 months”.
Herrmann said: “Because of witness testimony on what happened and also the course of the chat, there are indeed questions about whether he meant to set off the bomb at that moment”.
She remains a steady, unemotional leader who said recently: “Fear has never been a good adviser, neither in our personal lives nor in our society”.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said: “We think that we should not change our behaviour. A decision has to be taken on this each time and perhaps some members of the public have a different view to the way I chose to do things”, she added.
While the German political class has largely called for calm, opposition parties and rebels from Merkel’s own conservative bloc have accused her of exposing the country to an unacceptable level of risk without stricter controls on new arrivals.
“The threat of Salafist terrorism has arrived in Europe, in Germany, but also in Bavaria”, Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback said at a news conference with Herrmann.
The most deadly atrocity was carried out in Munich on 22 July when nine people were shot and killed by a German-Iranian teenager.
They have ruled out an Islamist motive, saying the assailant had far-right “sympathies”.
On July 18, a teenage Afghan asylum seeker slashed at passengers on a train in Wuerzburg with an ax and knife, wounding five.
After a 27-year-old Syrian with Islamist ties blew himself up in the town of Ansbach on Sunday, Sahra Wagenknecht of the far-left Linke party criticised as “flippant” Merkel’s mantra of “Wir schaffen das”, or “We can do this”, for handling the influx.
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Just hours before that attack another 21-year-old Syrian asylum seeker killed a woman in Reutlingen, attacking her with a knife almost two feet in length.
