Internationally, the left was shocked by a lot of votes last year. Europe’s most powerful and long-standing left-wing leader, Angela Merkel, was the last hope for the party to staving off the populist movement that is fast changing the world and relieving them of their power.
To their horror, she has openly denounced her previous stance and open border policies. The problems it brought to her country are so extreme that she has had to publicly apologize, and her very party is reshaping its platforms to try and recover their lost popularity before the national elections occur later this year.
Let’s take a look at just what was necessary to get her to make public statements that align with Trump’s immigration policy.
Position Change
It’s really since the end of last year that Merkel started to publicly voice her change of opinion. In 2015, she was one of the world’s leading champions for hosting refugees and being generally inclusive.
In December of last year, she went on record at a party meeting to make it clear that she wants the party and the country of Germany to make major shifts. The most notable is that she wants to lower the cap on the number of refugees Germany will admit.
On top of that, she wants to outlaw burkas “wherever possible.” Her other major statement is that Germany cannot have a repeat of 2015. All of these changes are a culmination of the impact the large swath of refugees have had on Germany over the past two years, and Merkel has fully adopted the stance that the Muslim refugees must be integrated into traditional German culture.
Conditions in Germany
We have to ask: why did she change her mind so dramatically? The reasons are twofold. The first big issue has been the impact refugees have had on German civilization. Most notably, they have introduced a new crime wave to the country.
Since the Syrians began coming in large numbers in 2014, refugee crime incidents have increased by roughly 100,000 each year. Overall violent crime has tripled across Germany, and the trend can be entirely attributed to refugees. While Muslim Syrians make up the majority of refugees in these trends, others from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia cannot be discounted.
The other source of Merkel’s reversal is political. While the crime sprees have likely contributed in large ways to the change in political climate, there is no doubt that refugees are a major issue for the nation’s voters. In a recent survey, roughly 60 percent of voting age Germans said that the most important issue for them in upcoming elections was Germany’s handling of Muslim refugees.
In the wake of that shift, right-wing populist candidates have won 10 out of 16 state assemblies since 2014, and all were considered upset victories. Merkel and her party have accepted that they will have to shift right in all of their policies to maintain power, and even that may not be enough. If Britain, the U.S. and France are any indicator, then Merkel’s tenure at the head of the German government may soon end.
Supporting Trump
How does this come back to Trump? For starters, the bulk of inflowing crime and contention in Germany is stemming from Trump-banned countries. The front runners are Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, three of the seven mentioned in his travel ban.
This is in complete opposition to the left’s narrative that refugees pose no credible threat. In reality, Germany is the best source of data on the topic, as they have taken in more refugees proportional to their population than any other developed nation.
The end result is that refugees make up less than 2 percent of the population, but they are responsible for roughly 30 percent of violent crime, theft and property crime. More to the point, a two-year period of increased refugee immigration caused massive spikes in all three types of crime.
Additionally, Muslim refugees from Trump-banned countries have been responsible for every terror attack in Germany in 2016, and hundreds of terror suspects are still being investigated by the country’s law enforcement.
Drawing Conclusions
When Merkel and Trump agree on a topic, it’s difficult to find a counter argument. The two stem from opposite political stances, and yet both have strongly advocated that refugees from Syria and similarly war-torn countries require extensive vetting before they can be safely admitted to a new country. The raw data shows this conclusively, and the issues are so extreme that they are reshaping the political field in Germany.
While the American Left continues to stall Trump’s reform (as they will with every policy he pushes), Europe is reshaping itself because the threat is undeniable. Ultimately, the end-game of refugee policy is inevitable, but for now the Democrats have to stall. If Trump is able to clean up too much of Obama’s mess in his first year, they may lose even harder in the mid-term elections than they did this past year.
~ Conservative Zone
