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69% of Germans Don't Link Terrorist Attacks to Refugees: Poll

  • Migrants line up outside the Berlin Office of Health and Social Affairs for their registration process.

    Migrants line up outside the Berlin Office of Health and Social Affairs for their registration process. | Photo: Reuters

Published 4 August 2016
Opinion

While conservatives have attacked Chancellor Merkel's refugee policies, most Germans do not link the policies to recent attacks.

A new poll shows that 69 percent of Germans do not believe there is a link between two recent attacks in the state of Bavaria, which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for, and Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy.

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The poll by Forsa, a Berlin-based research group, found that only 28 percent of respondents blamed Merkel’s policies for the attacks.

From those that blamed the chancellor, 78 percent supported the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party, which has used the fear-mongering of immigration in its xenophobic rhetoric. From supporters of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, 67 percent believed that the policies are not to be blamed.

The attacks that the poll referred to both took place in July, and led to the deaths of nine people and the injury of many more.

In a press conference last week, Merkel took on some of the conservative criticism over her policies and said that Germany “would stick to our principles” and not change the open-door policies.

"Someone who is fleeing war and persecution has a right to be protected according to the Geneva conventions," Merkel said.

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In the wake of a number of attacks in Europe, and the Brexit vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union, many conservatives have escalated their attacks against immigrants, calling them a threat to Europe, with a number of countries calling on tighter restrictions on asylum-seekers.

However, a recent report by Oxfam highlighted that the six richest countries in the world—the U.S., Germany, France, China, Japan and the U.K., which together make up 56.6 percent of the world economy—host only 2.1 million refugees combined, or less than 9 percent of the total number of estimated refugees.

More than half of the world’s refugees, which is about 12 million people, are hosted by Jordan, Turkey, Palestine, Pakistan, Lebanon and South Africa, countries that make up less than 2 percent of the world’s economy, with many more seeking shelter in countries such as Lebanon.

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