As Merkel leaves Facebook, terrorism and refugees divide Germany’s CDU
After giving up the leadership of
Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Angela Merkel
announced she is also giving up her Facebook page.
Last December, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a staunchly Catholic conservative career politician, was elected as the successor to Merkel, who will be able to see out her fourth term until 2021. She has expressed her determination to stay on as chancellor for the remaining three years of her term in office.
Merkel's 2015 open-door approach eroded her popularity and led to losses in regional elections/
Kramp-Karrenbauer is seeking to reconsider all the decisions regarding refugees and asylum seekers since the crisis in 2015. She outlined plans to change the party's migrant policies before next year's European election.
"I want to convene a 'workshop discussion' on migration and security with experts and critics of migrant and refugee policies to work on concrete improvements," Kramp-Karrenbauer told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Germany’s policy towards refugees went through dramatic changes, as in 2015, the Germans welcomes asylum seekers, and provided them with financial and moral support.
On Dec. As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, some 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds of people, according to police reports.
This has shocked Germany and stoked anxieties over absorbing refugees across Europe.
In July 2016, a teenage Afghan refugee hacked at passengers on a train in Wuerzburg with an axe and knife, wounding five. He was shot dead by police.
Also during the same month, a woman has been killed and two others have been injured after they were attacked by a Syrian refugee with a machete near Stuttgart in Germany.
Moreover, on July 2016, A failed Syrian asylum seeker has blown himself up and injured 12 other people with a backpack bomb near a festival in the south German town of Ansbach.
The 27-year-old man, who faced deportation to Bulgaria, detonated the device after being refused entry to the music festival, Bavarian officials say.
Berlin Attack
A tractor trailer barreled into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin in Dec. 2016, killing 12 people and injuring 49 others.
The truck driver, Anis Amri, a Tunisian, was later shot dead by the police in Milan.
He fired on police who asked him for ID during a routine patrol in the Sesto San Giovanni area.
Daesh released a video showing Amri pledging allegiance to its leader, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.
When Italian police stopped the suspect, who was on foot, he "immediately drew out a gun" and shot at the two policemen, Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said.
Amri was investigated earlier by German police over a suspected attempt to buy automatic weapons for an unconnected terror plot. He was a known criminal who fled his native Tunisia to escape imprisonment and spent time in jail in Italy.
He had connections with jihadist and extremist figures like Iraqi Salafist, Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah A, also known as Abu Walaa or “the preacher without a face”, who was arrested in Nov. 2016 on charges of recruiting volunteers to travel to the Middle East to fight for Daesh.
Alternative for Germany in the Bundestag
The year 2017 was a decisive year for the CDU, as polls show that it has been losing popular support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party; which is deemed a serious indicator, especially during the 2017 Bundestag election.
After getting 12.6% of the vote and more than 90 seats, after delivering a number of speeches against refugees, the AfD entered the parliament for the first tim
