Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow: Merkel Changes Her Mind Again
Wolfgang Streeck, 31 March 2016
A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. It wasn’t just media stories about suffering migrants that led her to invite the refugees in Budapest to come to Germany, no papers required and no questions asked. What Merkel called ‘showing a friendly face in an emergency’ was meant to shame those who, during the euro crisis, had enjoyed the cartoons of Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in Nazi uniform. By opening the German border, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground.