This strategy may work tactically in the immediate term, but can fail strategically in the long term. It provides an incubating and nurturing environment for ideas "outside" the mainstream, which the mainstream have convinced themselves they have dealt with. And then some issues catches them by surprise, and they have have a Black Swan event.

Isn't this pretty much what Brexit and Trump were?

Yep.

Voters and ideas don't just disappear.

http://m.dw.com/en/grand-coalition-t...sue/a-42346390

Germany 's government is crumbling, and the main reason? REFUGEES. Shouldn't the German government's first priority be to the German people? Ridiculous. Anyway, at this rate it's only a matter of time until someone will replace Merkel who will promise to make "Germany Great Again"

Well, I do believe that taking in refugees was not directly wrong.

However, if you are not a totalitarian regime, you have a lot of explaining to do to your citizens. This would have required her to stop traveling around the world. Instead, she'd have to visit town halls, make phone-calls to small-city mayors etc.


Also, due to the circumstances, a lot of those refugees were not correctly vetted.

I once saw a talk-show where a (female) journalist (she speaks German and Arabic/Farsi) reported wandering around the train-stations where the refugees waited and listening in to some of the conversations, or actually talking to them.

Some of them were quite open about their criminal past or their ambitions to milk the German welfare-state for as long and as much as possible.

Others were incredulous about the fact that German authorities were ignorant about who they were taking in...

My co-worker likes to say "In an ideal world, we could drink from the toilet bowl". In an ideal world, the government would have sent all the Arabic-speaking personnel it could muster into these camps to gather intelligence.

But it was all incredibly badly, hastily executed.
I'm pretty sure, she (Mrs Merkel) is aware of that now.

Government is all about execution. If you bungle that, there's not much left beyond sock-puppets cashing in monthly salaries.
And then, the people who make outlandish claims and have simple, catchy paroles aren't far.

Unknown talk show
Unknown female journalist

It was probably a Breitbart hoax

Germany's migrant rate is far below the Swiss one.


But both, Germany and Switzerland, are among the most performing countries in the world.


Others are not.


So where is the point of this thread?

I'm not sure what you are talking about. The things you mentioned (criminals, economic migrants) were already known to everyone BEFORE Merkel opened her mouth in 2015 and instigated the largest migration into EU in modern history. Her opening of the borders in 2015 was like watching a car crash in slow-motion..."no, watch out! stop! what are you doing?!"... everything was already known, yet nobody listened

Now German Socialists are demanding a return to the open borders of 2015, or they will refuse to work with the rest of the government I think they have overplayed their hand are are now destroying themselves, it's kind of like watching a car-crash again in slow motion, but this time I'm yelling "yes! go faster!"

Not just explaining.

There would have to be an open dialogue, and a dialogue means both sides get to speak and both sides must be prepared to change. Merkel went in thinking people had to fall in with her line 100% or otherwise be the German equivalent of a basket of Deplorables. There was no genuine desire for dialogue. You can find Youtube videos of senior German politicians losing it in town hall meetings and shouting people down in the ugliest terms.

When a government appears to no longer be for the people but against the people, they have basically lost it.

And when a government ahs obviously lost it but the press monolithically refuses to take them to task, the press has also lost it.

The car crash is complete.

It is funny how people conveniently forget that before "Merkel's invitation" there were already a couple of million refugees in the EU?

It is like "there were no refugees before, blame Merkel for everything"

When Merkel opened her mouth in 2015, it triggered a mad rush. The previous years saw something like 200,000 per year coming, in 2015 the number jumped 5x higher to about 1 million. With such a rush, Germany's resources couldn't cope and the whole disaster played out in real-time.

But on the bright side, it did throw the issue of refugees/migrants into the spotlight, and trigger a political shift to the right. There clearly needs to be some reform regarding refugees/migration. The fact that the left wants open borders and refuses to negotiate, while most normal/moderate people realize the need for reform and limits, is really going to sink the Left parties in the polls.

Unfortunately I think there are sufficient self-deluded leftist voters who don't understand why unlimited immigration can't work.

So the catastrophe that unfolded did help the right, and ongoing bad news is helping them further, but I don't think you can extrapolate that indefinitely.

At the end of the day it's going to have to be the centre that needs to stand up to the left.

This is also what the left is most afraid of. The right are useful punchbags they can blame things on, but they know that it's the centre that can shipwreck them.

Could you please keep from interrupting with a reality check, it's just too confusing to some.

So you are freely drawing a line between migration and successful economies?

Japan has a kickass economy with pretty much zero migration.

yup, and Turkey is pretty much overrun with refugees, but as Marton keeps reminding us, the economy is just down down down.

So maybe economics is a bit more complicated that that.

If the the above causation were real, somebody would have kick-started the Zimbabwean economy by now.

Providing wildly incorrect numbers does not help your case, a few minutes with google would show your statement of 200,000 per year is nonsense!

According to the UN refugee agency 714,300 asylum seekers reached Europe in 2014 compared to 485,000 in 2013, 571,000 in the EU in 2014.

Source

In 2015, ca. 650,000 refugees had already entered the EU before Merkel issued her "invitation" on Aug 31st 2015
Contrary to popular belief the number of first time asylum seekers entering the EU actually fell immediately after "Merkel's invitation" on 31st. August, see official graph below. There was no mad rush.

I think it's pretty difficult for a high-ranking politician to make room in his/her schedule for such a dialogue.
Mostly, because this schedule is made by people who want it to be as smooth and frictionless as possible.

The old question of "Does the office make the (wo)man or does the (wo)man make the office?".

The degree of isolation from reality that a politician has are quite staggering.
The higher the rank, the more layers of employees that separate them from us.

Unfortunately, they almost always only realize that, once they're voted out or retired (few politicians retire voluntarily in Germany, it's either the voter or the Grim Reaper that makes the decision for them...).

http://www.dw.com/en/two-million-ger...015/a-19131436

https://www.yahoo.com/news/migrant-a...111701016.html

Over 2 million foreign residents in Japan = zero migration

...or they commit political suicide by opening the borders and yelling "Wir schffen das!".

Strange, Germany's politics since WW2 have been stable, predictable and boring. The rise of the far-left has unhinged it all now...(and AfD is a direct result of the far-left's actions, by the way. They would never have existed in such strength otherwise)

There is a nice word in German for that, Machtdistanz.

I can understand that a politician who has been in office for too long sometimes fails to feel the pulse of society.

And if one guy criticizes you at a town hall meeting, you can assume he might be a bit crazy. If the entire building criticizes you, maybe you can imagine somebody set them up.

But if the same happens in every town you visit, every day, even the most out of touch but not totally stupid politician might start asking questions.

Like the German joke about the Geisterfahrer.

The news says, "drive carefully on the Autobahn A5 because there is a Geisterfahrer."

"What? One? I see thousands."