German Chancellor Angela Merkel will seek, at a party congress on Monday, to stamp out dissent in her conservative Christian Democratic Union over a record refugee influx after months of corrosive inf
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will seek, at a party congress on Monday, to stamp out dissent in her conservative Christian Democratic Union over a record refugee influx after months of corrosive infighting.
The expected arrival to Europe’s top economic power in 2015 of one million people fleeing war and poverty has scrambled the German political map, making the long-mighty Ms Merkel look vulnerable and reviving a nearly defunct right-wing populist party.
Just a year ago, Ms Merkel basked in her unchallenged power at a CDU congress in Cologne, winning re-election as its chief with a whopping 97 per cent in what she called an “overwhelming vote of confidence”.
And although Time magazine named her 2015’s “Person of the Year” while the Economist called her “the indispensable European” in November, her closest allies at home have been less enamoured of late.
The two-day meeting in the south-western city of Karlsruhe will see Ms Merkel try to calm fears among delegates that the asylum seekers represent a grave threat to the nation’s security and prosperity.
She will fight a growing faction of the party calling for a unilateral national cap on asylum seekers, her advisors say, favouring instead a long-shot bid to establish EU-wide contingents for member states.
