During a speech at her party’s conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her desire to ban full-faced veils in Germany.
"The full veil is not appropriate here, it should be forbidden wherever that is legally possible. It does not belong to us," she said to the Christian Democratic Union party members who gathered for the conference on Tuesday.
The announcement by Merkel was met with huge applause by party members who chose Tuesday to re-elet her as CDU chair. It also comes as Merkel has plans to run for re-election for Chancellor amid her party’s dramatic drop in support after supporting mass immigration by Muslim immigrants.
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union has suffered defeat in a string of local elections – even losing ground to more new and hardline parties calling for the closing of Germany’s borders. One such example is Alternative for Germany’s success in local elections and their groundswell of support from Germans who have had enough of asylum seekers pouring through their country’s borders.
Merkel has held firm in allowing more than one million refugees enter Germany in 2015 and beyond – making her country the most open nation in Europe for asylum seekers.
After poor performances by her party, Merkel has gone on to say perhaps “mistakes were made” during the process of accepting refugees. In an apparent attempt to appease German voters who have had enough of Middle Eastern immigration, she is now adopting a tough stance on full-face veils – a clear reference to the burka.
Would such a ban, that is already in effect in France and elsewhere, successfully pass the German legislature? Or better yet, will her new effort in adopting nativist stances help her win re-election?