Philip Manow, a Bremen-based political scientist said popular ideas “of Merkel’s Mother Teresa moment” circulate, but Germans should not be fooled by them. Merkel has served as German Chancellor since 2005 and Leader of the Christian Democratic Union since 2000.
Manow claims that the real reason why the German Chancellor favoured an open-door refugee policy was to save Germany from losing billions if its eurozone neighbour collapsed into economic ruin.
Writing for German newspaper FAZ, Manow said: “The opening of the border was the almost inevitable protection of the Greece deal,” because the country had invested tens of billions in the rescue of its eurozone neighbour in the face of bankruptcy. Billions from the EU countries might have been lost had the institutions in Greece collapsed, he said.
Greece was straining under the weight a growing number of asylum seekers entering the country at the same time, also as a result of the closure of the Balkan route. Despite a decision by Brussels in September 2015 to relocate 160 000 asylum seekers – including 106 000 from Greece and Italy – an estimated 200 men, women and children crossed its borders daily last year.
“In the chaos you would not even have to think about the requirements of the troika or just the punctual service of credit.”
But the German public had “no idea” of the “Euro crisis” in Greece and instead believed “completely naive ideas of Merkel’s Mother Teresa moment”.
The taxpayer money spent on bailing out Greece “would quickly have become obsolete if Greece had in fact been left to its own devices with the refugee crisis because of the domino effect of the border closures of Hungary, via Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Macedonia,” Manow explained.
In 2015 and 2016, there were 2 582 780 first-time asylum applications filed in Germany.
In Essen, a local leftwing politician from the pro-immigration SPD, Karlheinz Endruschat, has meanwhile warned against the development of Muslim parallel societies in the city. “The Islamification of the districts in the north of Essen has never been seriously questioned regarding future conflicts,” the councilman told the German newspaper Westdeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung (WAZ).
“The SPD is not looking for scapegoats, the SPD is looking for solutions,” Essen SPD chairman Thomas Kutschaty said. He quickly distanced himself from Endruschat’s statements.
Endruschat was accused of sounding too much like the anti-immigration party, the AfD. “We should not treat families living in the third or fourth generation as foreign bodies. Dual nationals are no problem, mosques are nothing ‘foreign’,” their spokesman Daniel Kerekeš told the news portal Lokalkompass.
According to the WAZ, a dispute is currently raging in the district parliament in Altenessen over parking for the visitors of newly built mosques. In Altenessen-Süd, the proportion of residents of foreign origin is over 41 percent.