German chancellor Angela Merkel has come under fire following her response to a Palestinian girl who burst into tears about the shadow of deportation hanging over her family’s life as refugees in Germany.
The incident took place during a public meeting between the German leader and a group of schoolchildren in the nothern city of Rostock.
The meeting, under the title “Living Well in Germany”, took an unexpected turn when one girl, Reem, told Ms Merkel that her family had lived in limbo for four years in Germany.
She said that her father, a welder, was not entitled to work in the country and her attempts to integrate - including learning fluent German - would come to nothing if her family was deported.
While her friends were making plans for the future, Reem said she had no future.
“I have goals like everyone else,” she said, adding that she spoke Arabic, English and Swedish, and planned to learn French next.
“Studying is a goal that I would like to reach.”
Merkel response
Ms Merkel acknowledged that “politics was hard”, but said that even when a backlog of asylum applications is cleared this year, not all applicants will be allowed to stay.
“If we say, ‘You can all come’, and ‘You can all come from Africa’ . . . we just can’t manage that,” she said.
When, without warning, the girl began to cry, Ms Merkel stepped over to stroke her hair, saying that she’d “done a great job”.
At this point the moderator stepped in, and said: “I don’t think, madam chancellor, it’s about doing well, I think this is a stressful situation for her . . . ”
“I know it is a stressful situation for her,” the German leader snapped back, “but I’d still like to caress her because we don’t want to bring you in such a situation [that] you have difficulties.”
Clips from the discussion session, streamed to schools across Germany, began to go viral under the hashtag #merkelstreichelt (Merkel caresses), with a hail of sarcastic remarks about how the chancellor was emotionless, chilly and inhuman.
The German media has weighed in with mixed reviews. While Spiegel Online suggested the weeping girl had “brought Merkel to pieces”, Die Welt suggested that Ms Merkel was “not emotionally inhibited, just linguistically” in her response.
Making a difficult situation worse, Ms Merkel’s office was forced to rewrite its report of the event, deleting a line that said that the girl “broke into tears of agitation”.
