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 natural disaster that ravaged central Italy on Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016, in Maranello, Italy, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016.
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Merkel has not said whether she will run for chancellor in next year’s election, telling a German television interviewer Sunday that she would “report on that at the appropriate time”.
‘After the many refugees we took in during the Yugoslav Wars, Germany was quite happy that it was mainly up to others to manage the issue, ‘ she added.
She said she had never intended “we can do it” to become a slogan.
“It is important that we make deals with the countries of origin”, Merkel said, giving the example of the deal struck between Italy, France and Germany and Mali and Niger to promote economic growth in the sub-Saharan countries.
Residents of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will head to the polls Sunday to elect a new regional parliament, while the capital Berlin votes on September 18.
Merkel tried to reassure the CDU/CSU Union parliamentary group on Thursday that there would not be a repeat 2015’s number of refugees entering the country as an intense debate broke out about her policies.
She said Wednesday that she stood by her words.
Those sales have come to halt as a result of the sanctions and many local farmers blame Merkel for their woes.
A poll this week showed that 50 percent of Germans don’t want her to run for a fourth term next year. Juergen Joost, secretary general of Alfa, a splinter party that broke away from the AfD past year, charged that Merkel is to blame for the rise of the populist group.
The Forsa poll showed support for all other parties was unchanged with the Social Democrats (SPD), who share power with Merkel’s conservatives on 22 percent.
A politically weakened Merkel not only plunges German politics into a period of deep uncertainty, it increases the scope for further turmoil in the European Union, already struggling to cope with the refugee crisis, the shock decision of Britain to leave the bloc and, crucially, persistent tensions in the vulnerable euro zone. The party has leveraged Merkel’s controversial refugee policy, using it as a platform for its anti-immigrant policy stances. “This is Angela Merkel’s policy and mine”.
“If we see a terror attack in Berlin, if there’s another (sexual assault) event like in Cologne over New Year’s, if the deal with Turkey (to return migrants) falls through and the refugee crisis escalates again with hundreds of thousands of people marching toward Germany’s borders, that will change things”.
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Merkel also rejected the notion that there was a direct connection between terrorism and accommodating so many migrants in the country. The CDU faces a rout in the city-state of Berlin two weeks later.
