With her now well-known words wir schaffen das, “we can manage this”, Merkel declared Germany open to refugees during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, shaping her own country and the EU for years to come
A Polish soldier walks past a barbed wire fence under construction on the border with Belarus in Zubrzyca Wielka near Bialystok, eastern Poland in August 2021.
With her trademark pragmatism, Merkel has steered the European Union’s largest economy through a number of crises, playing a major role in the 2010 sovereign debt crisis and the social fallout that resulted from austerity measures; more recently, she was instrumental in backing a common European Union response to the pandemic crisis.
As US and NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan, a number of European countries were quick to express their opposition to a possible repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis – despite the fact that most refugees remain in neighbouring countries, with Pakistan and Iran hostingout of the 2.6 million registered with the UN refugee agency across the world before the latest crisis began.
“In the campaign for the upcoming election, migration and asylum is not really a topic because it's so difficult and so unpopular, and so hard to resolve,” Andreas Bock of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European think tank, told TRT World.
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