The Calamity That Is Angela Merkel

Today in the Times of London noted economic historian Niall Ferguson assesses the tenure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He concludes that she has been an unremitting disaster.

You know that you can always count on the media and the cognoscenti to provide you with the highly varnished truth. With Merkel, doubtless for reasons that have something to do with sexual politics, the intellectual elites have been blind to her dereliction.

Ferguson seems to believe that his is  minority view:

The important truth about which very few people agree with me is that Angela Merkel has been a political disaster. The German chancellor has long been the darling of the pro-European media. In November 2015 The Economist called her “the indispensable European”. A month later the Financial Times named her its “person of the year”. Time magazine proclaimed her “chancellor of the free world”. I could go on.

Merkel’s problems stem in large part from making what Ferguson calls:

… the single biggest error in the history of the postwar German republic.

That would be, opening Germany to more than a million Muslim asylum seekers in 2015:

Since the start of 2015, Germany has received 1.38m “initial asylum applications”, about a third of them from Syrians. Three-quarters of the asylum seekers are aged 30 or younger; 60% are male. About half the applications have been approved, but only around 80,000 of those denied asylum have been deported. About 86% of accepted refugees are Muslims.

The full implications of this mass influx remain to be seen. According to the Pew Research Centre, the Muslim population of Germany (which was 6% in 2016) could be anything between 8.7% and 19.7% by 2050, depending on the future rate of immigration.

What have the consequences been? For one, crime has increased exponentially. For another, the political backlash has been, in Ferguson’s words, “seismic:”

The short-run consequences, however, are clear. There has been a marked increase in crime. And there has been a seismic political backlash. The crime issue is controversial, but last month a rigorous, government-commissioned study was published by the Zürich University of Applied Sciences, based on data from the state of Lower Saxony. By the end of 2016, around 750,000 of the state’s 8m residents were not German citizens, and about 170,000 of them had applied for asylum.

The Zürich study reveals that asylum seekers were responsible for a surge in violent crime, which had fallen by 22% between 2007 and 2014, but rose by more than 10% from then until the end of 2016. More than 92% of that increase was attributable to the newcomers, with young men from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia overrepresented among the perpetrators.

And the victims? In nine out of 10 murders and three-quarters of cases of grievous bodily harm, they were other migrants. But in 70% of robberies and 58.6% of rape and sexual assault cases, the victims were German. Think about that.

While you are thinking about that, you will see that Merkel has performed poorly by many other standards:

I could add to the case against Merkel. I believe she has reduced Germany to a condition of parlous geopolitical and military weakness. I believe she contributed significantly to the European mishandling of the Arab revolutions, which in turn triggered mass migration across the Mediterranean. I believe she did much to make the global financial crisis worse than it need have been for southern Europe, agreeing to bailouts only at the last minute, thereby maximising uncertainty about the future of the euro.

And yet, the intelligentsia wants and needs a powerful woman to set forth as the leader of the Western world. It makes us more woke. It makes us more feminist friendly. Thus, regardless of the Merkel record, the propaganda machine will continue to defend her.

After all, she was very close to Barack Obama. When Obama was projecting weakness around the world, he handed the scepter of Western leadership to his good friend and close ally, Angela Merkel.

Q.E.D.