German’s leader, Angela Merkel, vowed on Monday that the country would see no repetition of last year’s chaotic scenes on German borders.
“No one wants a repeat of last year’s situation, including me,” Merkel said.
Merkel’s admission of errors that she would avoid in future came in the wake of her party’s stinging defeat in local elections in Berlin. That was the latest round of regional elections which promoted the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party which has a strong anti-migrant platform.
But she also defended the “political and ethical” decision to admit about one million asylum seekers in the face of potential humanitarian catastrophe.
The mistake, the chancellor said, was that she and her government had not been quicker to prepare for the mass movement of people triggered by conflicts in the Middle East.
"If I could, I would turn back time many, many years to better prepare myself, the federal government and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation which hit suddenly in the late summer of 2015," Merkel said.
In unusually frank comments, the chancellor also noted that her country had been slow in coming to terms with multiculturalism.
"We weren't exactly the world champions in integration before the refugee influx," she admitted. She pointed to the need to hastily assemble the necessary infrastructure for processing applicants and providing language and job training.
She acknowledged that her "We can do this" rallying cry during the refugee crisis had only served to provoke many people who understood the depth of the challenges ahead.
As if by explanation of the open-door policy, she said that she had relied for too long on established treaties which placed refugees in the care of the first safe country they reached.
“To put it simply, this took the problem off Germany’s hands. And that was not good,” she explained.
She lamented that the European Union as a whole was failing to recognise the refugee crisis as “a global and a moral challenge”.
“In 1990, when the wall fell, the cold war came to an end and freedom blossomed everywhere; it looked like we were on an irreversible road to victory, and that it was just up to the rest of the world to join our model. Freedom had won. It now turns out things aren’t that simple”.
For a long time the Chancellor refused to bow to criticism of her refugee policy, insisting that she had acted correctly in difficult circumstances.
Some of her political friends and foes are hoping her comments indicate that her government may be on course to implement a less liberal policy by reducing and restricting refugee numbers.
