Angela Merkel, the invisible European

EXCEPTIONS PROVE who rules. In the summer of 2015 Angela Merkel suspended the EU’s asylum rules and allowed 1m people into Germany, in the most controversial decision of her tenure. Rather than being returned to their first port of entry in southern Europe, Syrians arriving in Germany were given a new life in Europe’s most prosperous country. Skip forward to December 2021 and asylum rules are being suspended again. This time the aim is to keep people out. Those crossing from Belarus into the EU now face up to four months in a detention centre while their application is processed. Others will not make it even that far. Polish border guards are pushing them back into Belarus, sometimes roughly. Willkommenskultur has been shown the door.