BERLIN: German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview on Saturday that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives had “underestimated” the challenge of integrating a record migrant and refugee influx.
Gabriel is also leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) — the junior coalition partner in Merkel’s government — and his comments come as campaigning gets under way for a federal election next year and for regional elections in Berlin and the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees flocked to Germany from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere last year. Concerns about how to integrate them all into German society and the labour market are now rife and support for the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has grown. “I, we always said that it’s inconceivable for Germany to take in a million people every year,” Gabriel said in extracts of an interview with broadcaster ZDF released on Saturday.
300,000 refugees to come
The head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told newspaper Bild am Sonntag that Germany took in less than one million migrants and refugees last year and said he expected a maximum of 300,000 refugees to arrive in Germany this year.
At a separate news conference yesterday, Gabriel said: “There is an upper limit to a country’s integration ability.” He said Germany had 300,000 new schoolchildren due to the migrant influx and added that the country could not manage to integrate so many into the school system every year because there would not be enough teachers.
In the ZDF interview, Gabriel also criticised Merkel’s catchphrase “Wir schaffen das”, meaning “We can do this”, which she adopted during the migrant crisis last summer and has repeatedly used since.
Merkel used the phrase at a news conference she held in late July after a spate of attacks on civilians in Germany, including two claimed by Daesh, that have put her open-door migrant policy in the spotlight. Her popularity has slipped since those attacks.
