So, I’m curious. What is the mood in Germany toward Angela Merkel about all this? It seems like she has rolled out the welcome mat without asking anyone.
This is the odd part of the story.
Since Merkel has been around...no big scandals and no negative economy. Jobs are plentiful, and people are happy. She took the conservative party and absorbed the anti-nuke power agenda. She’s taken probably half of the liberal agendas and made them her own.
Right now...the liberal party is at the weakest point they’ve been in decades. The national election is in the fall of 2017. They don’t have any four-star characters to run against Merkel. Because of this...there’s a discussion that Merkel will finally bow out in 2017, and a new right-wing person will emerge and run instead of her.
Then the final odd ingredient of the current situation. I’d take a humble guess to say 25-to-35 percent of the population is fairly upset about the refugee situation, and another 20-percent is asking stupid questions (how many and how much will it cost). This smaller group might accept the majority story right now....but it’s awful weak. The government (using both a consolidated right and left wing situation to run the gov’t)....is doing a two-star job on management (hurting the SPD as much as it hurts the CDU).
For months (since April), they’ve been using tents to house half of the refugees. Well...September has arrived with chilly temperatures, and the tents won’t work (no, they didn’t buy the Army-type tent...just the cheap stuff). So, they got to make big decisions that will cost hundreds of millions....to house these guys over the winter. And more (probably 100,000 for Sep/Oct alone) will arrive. The number of 850,000 for 2015....I think will be wrong, and its bound to be 1.2 million coming in.
Ethically, the public thinks they are doing the right thing, and they thought that the other EU countries would take a big number of these guys. Well....they were wrong on that estimate. The thing is....even if the public gets angry....who do you really blame? There is no real border, and this what everyone demanded a decade ago.