Angela Merkel is about to pay for the ‘Mutti’ of all blunders

The important truth about which very few people agree with me is that Angela Merkel has been a political disaster…Since the start of 2015, Germany has received 1.38m “initial asylum applications”, about a third of them from Syrians…The full implications of this mass influx remain to be seen…

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.

The political backlash has only just begun, but already it has transformed the German political landscape. In last year’s election, the anti-immigration party known as Alternative for Germany came third with 12.6% of the vote. The latest polls have it on 15% and rising. We are fast approaching the point when it will be the country’s second-largest party after Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). It is already large enough to make coalition-building an intractable challenge. Five months after the election, Germany still lacks a new government.