Merkel Says Germany Won’t Stop Accepting Refugees, Muslims Chancellor disappointed by her party’s losses in Berlin state electionBy Anton Troianovski
http://www.wsj.com/articles/merkel-says-germany-wont-stop-accepting-refugees-muslims-1474288469
BERLIN—German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted to her party’s latest electoral loss by sticking to her migration policy on Monday but acknowledging, more explicitly than before, that she had made mistakes along the way.
Ms. Merkel described her center-right Christian Democratic Union’s second-place performance in Sunday’s election in the city-state of Berlin as a “very unsatisfactory, disappointing” result. She acknowledged widespread public discomfort with the influx of more than a million asylum applicants to Germany this year and last and said that she heard voters’ concerns.
“If I could, I would turn back time many, many years to be able to better prepare myself and the whole government and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation that met us rather unprepared in late summer 2015,” Ms. Merkel said at a news conference at her party’s headquarters in the German capital.
Nevertheless, Ms. Merkel—whose steadfast refusal to close the German border to asylum seekers has become a focal point in the global debate over how to treat refugees—said she would stick to her current policy. She said she was guided both by a conviction that Germany has a duty to take in people in need but also that the sort of chaotic, mass influx of people as this country experienced last year had to be prevented.
The processing of asylum requests and deportation of those rejected needed to be sped up, she said, while conditions in Africa, Syria, and elsewhere needed to be improved to reduce the numbers of refugees.
“No one wants this to be repeated, and I don’t either,” Ms. Merkel said of last year’s refugee influx at Germany’s borders. “We have learned from history.”
The Alternative for Germany, an upstart, anti-immigrant party that took 14.2% in Sunday’s Berlin vote, has called for the country to turn away asylum seekers at the border and to limit immigration by Muslims. Ms. Merkel’s sister party in the state of Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, has sought an annual cap on how many refugees Germany accepts and called for precedence to be given to immigrants from Christian countries.
ENLARGE Ms. Merkel rejected those calls in her remarks on Monday. Blocking all refugees or all Muslims, she said, would contradict not only “the German constitution and our country’s duties under international law, but also above all the ethical foundations of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and my personal convictions.”
The center-left Social Democrats won Sunday’s election in the city-state of Berlin with just 21.6% of the vote—the worst result for any winner in a state election in German postwar history. Both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, who came in second with 17.6%, saw their worst results in a Berlin state election and lost more than 5 percentage points compared with the previous Berlin election, in 2011. CONTINUE AT SITE
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