If we learned anything in September (other than that the Fed has now officially come to terms with its reflexivity problem), it’s that not every EU nation is as excited as Germany claims to be about relocating the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.
Ultimately, it was just a matter of who would push back first and we got the definitive answer when Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, fed up with the thousands of migrants streaming into the country from the south, moved to construct a 100-mile razor wire fence on the border with Serbia.
When some refugees decided to test Orban’s resolve, he sent in the riot police, serving notice that Budapest has no intention of softening its stance on the issue.
While we understand the importance of preserving territorial integrity, we’ve also been careful to note that the massive people flow that’s inundated the Balkans carries the very real risk of creating the conditions for dangerous bouts of intense nationalism and scapegoating xenophobia.
The simple fact is that between Angela Merkel’s willingness to accommodate hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and the sheer horror of the conditions the refugees are fleeing, it’s going to take a lot more than a fence and a fire hose to deter migrants on their quest to reach the German promised land, which means that Europe is going to have to come to terms with a new reality and a meaningful demographic shift.
Needless to say, not everyone is going to be happy about that, and the situation is made immeasurably worse by Brussels' move to force recalcitrant countries to settle asylum seekers against lawmakers’ wishes. But it’s not just Slovakia and Hungary where the backlash is being felt. As The Telegraph reports [11], quite a few Germans are now unhappy with Berlin’s approach to the crisis and the uneasy feelings are beginning to manifest themselves in protests by far-right extremists. Here’s more:
Germany's domestic intelligence chief warned on Sunday of a radicalisation of Right-wing groups amid a record influx of migrants, as xenophobic rallies and clashes shook several towns at the weekend.
President Joachim Gauck meanwhile warned of Germany's "finite capacity" to absorb refugees, cautioning against more "tensions between newcomers and established residents".
Domestic spy chief Hans-Georg Maassen said that "what we're seeing in connection with the refugee crisis is a mobilisation on the street of Right-wing extremists, but also of some Left-wing extremists" who oppose them.
He added, speaking on Deutschlandfunk public radio, that for the past few years his service had witnessed a "radicalisation" and "a greater willingness to use violence" by all extremist groups,
including the far right, the anti-fascist far-left and Islamists.
Police and soldiers guarded two buses carrying about 100 migrants on Saturday night to a shelter in the town of Niederau, in the eastern Saxony state, after Right-wing protesters had rallied at the site, a former supermarket, since Friday.
More than 1,000 people also demonstrated against refugees in several towns in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Friday, including in coastal Stralsund where three people were wounded in clashes with counter-protesters.
In the eastern city of Leipzig, the right-wing rally "Offensive for Germany", organised by local anti-Islam activists with about 400 marchers, sparked a larger counter-protest that police said drew more than 1,000 activists.
In the ensuing street clashes, the rival groups hurled rocks and fireworks at each other.
And if the following from Bloomberg (citing Spiegel) is any indication, the situation will likely escalate further going forward:
[German] govt plans to start sending trains soon to Salzburg, Austria to bring ~4,000 refugees/day to initial-admission centers in Germany, Spiegel Online reports without saying where it obtained information.
It goes without saying that just about the last thing the world needs at a time when racial and religious tensions are running high is for Germany to start ever-so-gradually backsliding into the 1920s, and while that might seem far-fetched now, we would point to the shocking electoral gains [12] posted earlier this month by Golden Dawn in Greece as evidence that intense nationalism still strikes a chord when the going gets especially tough and on that note, we close with the following from Gatestone [13]:
German authorities are applying heavy-handed tactics to find housing for the hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees pouring into the country from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
With existing shelters filled to capacity, federal, state and local authorities are now using legally and morally dubious measures — including the expropriation of private property and the eviction of German citizens from their homes — to make room for the newcomers.
German taxpayers are also being obliged to make colossal economic sacrifices to accommodate the influx of migrants, many of whom have no prospect of ever finding a job in the country. Sustaining the 800,000 migrants and refugees who are expected to arrive in Germany in 2015 will cost taxpayers at least at least 11 billion euros ($12 billion) a year for years to come.
As the migration crisis intensifies, and Germans are waking up to the sheer scale of the economic, financial and social costs they will expected to bear in the years ahead, anger is brewing.
