“Cityscape” debate: Angela Merkel calls for “moderation and center”

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) did not directly address the current “cityscape” debate or other current questions at a reading in Bonn in the evening. The former head of government read from her autobiography “Freedom” for a good hour and a half and talked about her life. The audience in the packed Bonn Opera repeatedly interrupted her with applause and celebrated her with a standing ovation at the end.

Merkel devoted a lot of time to 2015, when almost a million refugees came to Germany and she uttered her most famous sentence, “We can do it.” She was critical of the term “refugee flow”, saying that after all you always have to look at the individual person.

Especially when it comes to refugee policy, Merkel warned that one must act “honestly and in a measured tone.” “The vast majority of people have an unmistakable sense of whether politicians are acting out of a calculation, whether they are letting the AfD lead them through the ring by the nose, so to speak, or whether they are acting because they are sincerely interested in solving problems,” she read from her book. For democratic parties, “moderation” is the basis and prerequisite for their success.

The origin of the “cityscape” debate is a statement by Federal Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz. Merz said on October 14th that the federal government was correcting previous failures in migration policy and making progress, “but of course we still have this problem in the cityscape, and that is why the Federal Minister of the Interior is now in the process of enabling and carrying out returns on a very large scale.” You can read exactly what the Chancellor said here.

Last Wednesday he specified that problems would be caused by migrants who did not have a permanent residence status, did not work and did not adhere to the rules in force in Germany.