Feeling the walls closing in on her, 61-year-old German Chancellor Angela Merkel rolled the dice with the Syrian refugee crisis, now facing a backlash that could break the European Union. Brussels entrenched bureaucracy costing, billions from 29 its members, faces its toughest challenge absorbing millions of Syrian refugees fueling havoc in the continent. Pushing the Deutsch Bundestag [lower house] and Bundesrat [upper house] of parliament to back her plan to accept unlimited Syrian refugees has backfired on Merkel, creating a backslash threatening her position in the Christian Democratic Union. When a mob of Syrian refugees attacked and raped women on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany convulsed with Merkel’s failed policy taking in indiscriminate numbers of Syrian refugees. Merkel has pressed European Union leaders to pull their weight with refugees.
Merkel overestimated Germany’s capacity to handle floods of Syrian refugees seeking to immigrate to Germany under a poorly defined asylum law, allowing refugees from war-torn lands to seek permanent residence. Whether permanent or temporary, accepting thousands of Syrian refugees has pushed Germany’s capacity to the breaking point, prompting Merkel to pressure EU members to help out. EU Chief Executive Jean-Claude Juncker doesn’t know how much longer Brussels or Berlin can bear the weight of the Syrian crisis, fearing the collapse of the EU. Merkel and Juncker look to Turkey to absorb more Syrian refugees, something the EU’s already paying Ankara to handle. Many Mideast and North African refugees see a brighter future in the EU rather than Turkey. If other EU countries or Turkey doesn’t step up soon, Germany could shut its doors to refugees.
Meeting in Geneva Jan. 25, Merkel hopes that Special U.N. peace envoy Staffan de Mistrua finds a fix to the Syrian “civil war,” costing some 250,000 lives and driving two million refugees to neighboring countries and Europe. De Mistura can’t ignore the five-year-old Saudi proxy war seeking to topple the Shiite government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Since sponsoring the “Arab Spring” in 2011, Saudi Arabia has cryptically backed various terror groups responsible for toppling regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria. Opposing the Saudi proxy war in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin finally prevailed on President Barack Obama to no longer call, like the Saudis, for regime change in Damascus. Finding a fix to Syria’s Saudi-backed proxy war could stem the flow of refugees into Euroope, now threatening to break the EU and Eurozone’s common market.
Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned his fellow Schengen [EU] ministers that Germany could not endure the refugee crisis on its own. “Many think this is a German problem,” Schaeuble told EU finance minister in Brussels. “But if Germany does what everyone expects, then we’ll see that it’s not a German problem—but a European one,” said Schaeuble, confronting the lack of support in EU countries to spread the refugee burden proportionally. EU countries, like Denmark and Austria, want to build fences, requiring travelers to present ID, in effect ending Schengen [free travel]. “If you build a fence, it’s the end of Europe as we know it,” said an unnamed EU official. “Without Schengen . . .the euro has no point,” Juncker told a New Year’s gathering. Juncker’s warnings are aimed directly at de Mistura who must work to end to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Backlash against Merkel’s open-door policy threatens the entire EU, where most countries don’t have Germany’s resources to spend on housing, providing resources and jobs to refugees. “No one can pretend that you can have a common currency without being able to cross borders relatively easily,” Merkel said, discourage fence-building. Schengen, or traveling between borders of EU countries, doesn’t have to do with the Euozone, where only 17 of 29 EU countries participate. Whether the euro survives or not is less related to borders but the current economic challenges imposed by the global slowdown and refugee crisis in the EU. Merkel hopes that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can help take the refugee burden off the EU, especially Germany. Turkey’s already received the first installment of 3 billion euros to deal with the flood of Syrian refugees.
Merkel badly miscalculated the strain on Germany and the EU to the Syrian refugee crisis. Losing votes in the Budestag and Bundesrat, the Syrian refugee crisis threatens her 11-year rule of Germany. “There’s a big risk that Germany closes. From that, no Schengen . . . There’s a risk that the February summit could start a countdown to the end,” said an unnamed EU official. With Italy opposing funneling money to Ankara, the EU must pony up to manage more refugees or close its borders. No one in the EU other than Germany wants to take more Mideast refugees, seeking to pay Turkey to manage more refugee camps. While the winter’s seen a 50% reduction of refugees streaming into Europe, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos sees the situation as getting worse. Merkel must coordinate in Berlin with de Mistura’s in Geneva before it’s too late.
