Angela Merkel forced to change refugee stance

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to modify her liberal stance toward refugees, after a spate of assaults during the New Year’s Eve celebrations blamed on asylum seekers.

Turning away from her mantra of “we will manage this” over the record influx of asylum seekers that reached 1.1 million last year, Ms Merkel has now backed changes to the law to make it easier to expel those convicted of crime.

“If the law does not suffice, then the law must be changed,” she said on Saturday, warning that any refugee handed a jail term — even if it was a suspended sentence — should be kicked out of the country.

“Cologne has changed everything, people now are doubting,” said Volker Bouffier, vice-president of Ms Merkel’s CDU party.

Even though no arrests have been made or formal charges laid, the Cologne police said those suspected over the rampage near the city’s railway station a week ago were mostly asylum seekers and illegal migrants from North Africa.

Over 510 cases have already been lodged, the police said, adding that about 40 per cent of these related to allegations of sexual assault. Nineteen suspects were under investigation, the police said, adding that a 19-year-old Moroccan man had been arrested on suspicion of theft.

Separately in Hamburg, the police said 133 cases have been lodged for similar violence on New Year’s festivities.

Justice minister Heiko Maas said he believed the violence in Cologne was organised. “For such a horde of people to meet and commit such crimes, it has to have been planned somehow,” he told Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “No one can tell me that this was not coordinated or planned. The suspicion is that a specific date and an expected crowd was picked,” he said.

The scale of the Cologne assaults has stoked public anger and fear, with a poll published by Bild am Sonntag newspaper saying that 39 per cent of those surveyed felt police did not provide sufficient protection, while 57 per cent did.

And just under half (49 per cent) believed the same sort of mob violence could hit their hometown, reported the newspaper which headlined its article with the question: “Is the New Year Eve scandal the result of wrong policies ”

With thousands of asylum seekers streaming into Germany every day since last year, Ms Merkel has already come under intense pressure, even within her own conservative alliance, to reverse her open-door policy to war refugees.

Critics have questioned Germany’s ability to integrate the massive numbers of newcomers, many of whom hail from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.