Excerpt:
Wednesday was the first time Angela Merkel addressed the Bundestag after the unprecedentedly long and difficult process of forming a new government. It was thus a chance for the conservative Christian Democratic (CDU) chancellor to sell her plans for her fourth term in office and third as the leader of a grand coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD).
So it was significant that Merkel began her address with a discussion of her own political Achilles’ heel: her welcoming stance toward the numerous migrants and refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016. She called her famous “We can do this” statement from 2015 a “point of crystallization” in a process that “has divided and polarized our country.”
The chancellor noted that Germany had mastered this “unprecedented challenge” but added that they country’s acceptance of more than 1 million migrants was a “humanitarian exception” that would not be repeated.