Angela Merkel's Popularity Plunges After Wave of Jihad Attacks in Germany — Unexpectedly!

Well, this is a total surprise.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Merkel’s Popularity Plunges After July Attacks":

Support for Angela Merkel drops 12 points, to 47%, after July attacks in Germany: https://t.co/FR7iBTaBuh

— WSJ Think Tank (@WSJThinkTank) August 5, 2016

BERLIN — Mounting concerns about terrorism, migration and relations with Turkey are eroding support among German voters for Europe’s long-dominant leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, as she decides whether to run for a fourth term.

A poll released late Thursday showed Ms. Merkel’s approval rating plummeting 12 points in the space of a month and confidence in her handling of refugee policy at a new low.

It was conducted Monday and Tuesday, following a wave of violence in southern Germany in late July that included two terrorist acts by migrants, allegedly linked to Islamic State, that injured 20 people.

“Of course we can do it. The country won’t collapse,” said Karl-Georg Wellmann, a lawmaker with Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, referring to the chancellor’s slogan regarding the recent wave of around a million migrants.

“But people don’t want to hear this anymore,” he said. “They want to hear that we have things under control.”


The poll conducted by Infratest Dimap found Ms. Merkel’s approval rating at 47%, down from 59% a month before. Nearly two thirds said they disapproved of her refugee policy, the highest level since the pollster started asking the question last fall. The poll had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.

In addition to terrorism fears, recent polls register deep discomfort with Ms. Merkel’s bid to keep working closely with Turkey to stem the tide of migrants and refugees trekking to Europe, especially in the wake of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on domestic opponents after last month’s failed military coup.

Germans follow events in Turkey closely, in part because of worries that tensions there could spill over into Germany’s large Turkish community.

In the latest poll, 88% said the German government should be more assertive in confronting Turkey.

“The German people clearly believe that Germany should be tougher towards Mr. Erdogan,” said Oskar Niedermayer, professor of political science at Berlin’s Free University. “If Mr. Erdogan moves even more towards dictatorship than he is already doing,” and possibly calls the migration deal with the European Union into question, “this would of course be a very difficult situation for Ms. Merkel,” he said.

A top aide to Ms. Merkel said neither the attacks in Germany nor events in Turkey would affect the basics of the government’s migration policy...

I guess the German government's never heard of the first rule of holes.

More.

Angela Merkel is TIME's Person of the Year

Well, she gets this accolade right before the CDU (and the voters) throw her out on her ass.

See, "Chancellor of the Free World."

Angela Merkel is TIME’s 2015 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/Be7EjFlRS2 pic.twitter.com/3YLPZJYSlq

— TIME.com (@TIME) December 9, 2015

Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban Rejects Angela Merkel's 'Welcoming' Ideology of Unchecked Immigration Suicide

Well a right-wing party, and apparently anti-immigrant, just won the majority in Poland's parliamentary elections this week, so perhaps we're witnessing a major shift in European politics. Or at least, in East European politics.

From James Traub, at Foreign Policy, "The Fearmonger of Budapest":

BUDAPEST, Hungary — The European response to the refugee crisis that escalated this August has two poles: Germany’s Angela Merkel and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Merkel has consistently maintained that the immense flow of refugees from Middle Eastern war zones constitutes a collective moral obligation for Europe; Orban has called this view a species of madness. Orban is as powerful a spokesman for nativism and xenophobia as Merkel is for universalism.

And Orban got there first. In mid-January, after attending a mass rally in Paris honoring the victims of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket, Orban said in an interview, “We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people. Therefore, immigration must be stopped.” Orban was quite explicit about the kind of immigration he especially opposed. “We do not want to see a significant minority among ourselves that has different cultural characteristics and background,” he said. “We would like to keep Hungary as Hungary.” That was the lesson he took from Charlie Hebdo.

Orban is fully prepared to wade into the darkest pools of the Hungarian psyche. In April, still well before the refugee flood, Orban’s government distributed a questionnaire to all adult Hungarians which stated, among other things, “Some people believe that the mishandling of immigration issues in Brussels and the spread of terrorism are connected.” It then went on to ask, “Do you agree with this opinion?” Citizens were also told, “Some people say that immigrants threaten the jobs and livelihood of Hungarians,” then asked, “Do you agree?” The U.N.’s human rights commission condemned the questionnaire as “extremely biased” and “absolutely shocking.” Nevertheless, most of those who bothered to answer did, of course, agree. Having thus manufactured a show of public support, Orban’s Fidesz party posted billboards around the country with messages like, “If you come to Hungary, you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians.”

Orban had prepared the Hungarian people in advance for the Biblical tide of refugees who began pouring through Hungary on their way to Germany or Sweden. The fences he ordered built at the border with Serbia and then with Croatia; his use of the army to turn back refugees; his scathing rhetoric; his passage of emergency laws that criminalized the very act of seeking asylum — all have been denounced across Europe, but they’ve done wonders for his standing at home. In recent years, support had been steadily draining from Fidesz to the ultranationalist Jobbik party, but by September of this year the trend had begun to reverse.

Why is Hungary different? To be fair, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have all resisted the idea of accepting Muslim refugees, but unlike Hungary they don’t have to deal with 300,000 refugees crossing their territory and overwhelming their infrastructure. Yet both Croatia and Slovenia, which have had to deal with refugees diverted from Hungary, have behaved and sounded more like Germany than Hungary. In Slovenia, the army fed the refugees and walked them to the Austrian border. Croatia’s interior minister explained his country’s policy by saying, “Nobody can stop this flow without shooting.”

That is not the view I heard in Budapest, including from people otherwise suspicious of Orban. Istvan Gyarmati, a retired diplomat who now runs a democracy promotion institute in Budapest, told me that “now everyone agrees that Orban was right about the refugees.” It would not be long, he predicted, before Merkel realized that she had a policy and political catastrophe on her hands. I asked Gyarmati how he thought the problem should be resolved. That was easy: “The alternative is to keep them out of Europe.” Once they had fled the war zone for the safety of Turkey or Jordan, they no longer needed asylum or could legally claim such status. They were just migrants. I heard the same argument — which does, in fact, correspond to the letter, if not the spirit, of the Geneva Conventions — from several government officials. When I pointed out that this meant building a wall around Europe, they shrugged...

Traub talked to all these people and he still doesn't get it, marinated in his "welcoming" collectivist ideology that both Poland and Hungary are rejecting.

Put a wall around Europe? Yeah, you think?

Still more.

Homeowners in Poland Borrowed in Swiss Francs, and Now Pay Dearly

Poles borrowed in loans denominated in Swiss francs, but they have to pay back the loans on the local currency, the zloty. With the franc appreciating against the Euro, payments on Polish mortgages are skyrocketing.

And they thought the low rates on the Swiss loans, with a "stable" currency, was such a good deal.

At the New York Times, "Swiss Franc Rises, and Poland’s Mortgages Go With It."

Chilling Drone Footage Shows Sheer Scale of Auschwitz Death Camp (VIDEO)

Here: "Auschwitz 70th anniversary: Drone footage shows scale of camp."

And at the Irish Independent, "Chilling drone footage captures Auschwitz ahead of 70th anniversary of liberation."

Obama Will Not Attend 70th Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation

And this is a surprise?

At Free Beacon.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will represent the U.S. at the ceremonies. A token gesture, if that.

Moment of Passage for Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

At the New York Times, "For Auschwitz Museum, A Time of Great Change":

OSWIECIM, Poland — For what is likely to be the last time, a large number of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz will gather next week under an expansive tent, surrounded by royalty and heads of state, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of those held there at the end of World War II.

“This will be the last decade anniversary with a very visible presence of survivors,” said Andrzej Kacorzyk, deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which encompasses the sites of the original concentration camp, near the center of Oswiecim, and the larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau on the city’s outskirts.

At the 60th anniversary, 1,500 survivors attended. This year, on Tuesday, about 300 are expected. Most of them are in their 90s, and some are older than 100.

“We find this to be a moment of passage,” Mr. Kacorzyk said. “A passing of the baton. It is younger generations publicly accepting the responsibility that they are ready to carry this history on behalf of the survivors, and to secure the physical survival of the place where they suffered.”

A preliminary list of those attending includes President François Hollande of France, President Joachim Gauck of Germany and President Heinz Fischer of Austria, as well as King Philippe of Belgium, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. The United States delegation will be led by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said he would not attend because his schedule was too crowded and because he had not received an invitation. Museum officials said no head of state had received one. Mr. Putin had attended the 60th anniversary ceremony in 2005 — it was Soviet troops, after all, who liberated the camp in 1945 — but relations between Russia and Poland have soured over the conflict in Ukraine.

Previous commemorations had been held outside, Mr. Kacorzyk said, but it can be very cold in Poland in late January. The remaining survivors will be among about 3,000 dignitaries who will keep warm beneath a tent large enough to enclose the entire redbrick gateway building to Auschwitz II and its peaked tower, familiar from many films as a symbol of Nazi atrocities.

“Auschwitz is important because it was ground zero of what the Nazis did,” said Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a major contributor to the preservation of the museum complex. “And it is important because anti-Semitism is like a virus. You think it goes away but then it’s coming back. Right now, it is coming back very strongly.”

President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland will open the ceremony, and Mr. Lauder will deliver a short speech. But most of the speakers at the memorial event will be survivors, telling their own stories.

“I was there from September of 1944 until the end,” said Ryszard Horowitz, a photographer now living in New York who was 5 when Auschwitz was liberated. “I remember several scenes from the end. I know we were, at one point, lined up to be killed, just before the liberation, when one of the SS people arrived screaming that the Russians were coming, so they just dropped everything and ran and left us.”

Mr. Horowitz said he would not attend this year’s ceremony.

“I went there twice after the war,” he said. “Once, when I was quite young, and then I went back during one of my return trips to Poland in the 1970s. That was enough for me. I do not want to go back.”

His sister, Niusia Karakulski, who also survived the camps, will represent the family at the event.

This year’s anniversary also coincides with a shift in the way the site’s administrators conceive of their mission. From now on, they said, the site will be organized to explain to generations who were not alive during the war what happened rather than to act as a memorial to those who suffered through it.

A foundation has been raising money for a new wave of preservation. There will be new exhibition halls, and a visitor’s center will be built in the camp’s former meat processing and dairy site. A theater used to entertain Polish troops during the war will become an education center...

More.

Plus, published just today, at the Auschwitz Museum webpage, "Revision of the way we see the world and ourselves. Auschwitz Memorial Report 2014."

75th Anniversary of Start of World War Two

Nazi Germany invaded Poland 75 years ago today.

At the Tampa Bay Times, "75 years ago today: the start of World War II:

Today marks the 75th anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland, thus beginning the start of World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, more than 50 million, and by some count millions more, soldiers and civilians had died. The atrocities of the Holocaust stand sorely at the center of the tragedy of the war.

Also at Time, "World War II Erupts: Haunting Color Photos from 1939 Poland."

Also, at Deutsche Welle, and interview with British historian Anthony Beevor, "'Moral choice explains fascination with WWII'."

Poland on Edge as Russia Carves Up Ukraine

So I guess I'm not the only one making World War II analogies in light of Russian aggression in Ukraine. If anyone would know the consequences of appeasement, it'd be the Poles.

At the Times of Israel, "Poland on edge 75 years after Hitler and Stalin carved it up":

Memories of World War II have been bubbling to the surface since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March.

WARSAW (AFP) — Poland marks the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II Monday with one eye on Russia, which invaded it during the war and is now throwing its weight around in neighboring Ukraine.

From the very first German shells fired at a Polish fort in Gdansk in the early hours of September 1, 1939, to the final days in 1945, Poland suffered some of the worst horrors of the war, chief among them the extermination of most of its Jewish population by the Nazis.

Nearly six million Poles, or about 17 percent of the population — including around three million Jews — died in the conflict.

Memories of the era have been bubbling to the surface since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March, and a fierce conflict began in the country’s east.

“To use military force against one’s neighbors, to annex their territory, to prevent them from freely choosing their place in the world — this provides a worrying reminder of the dark chapters of Europe’s 20th-century history,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in a newspaper opinion piece ahead of the anniversary.

Polish historian Andrzej Friszke meanwhile recalled the infamous Munich agreement that Britain and France signed with Nazi Germany in 1938, allowing it to annex swathes of Czechoslovakia in a failed bid to avert war...

More.

Poland Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski Blasts Obama Administration: U.S. Alliance is 'Worthless, Harmful...'

Caught on tape, as did Victoria Nuland, expressing how he really feels.

And you gotta love it!

At Time, "Report: Poland’s Foreign Minister Blasts ‘Worthless’ U.S. Relationship."

And also at the Washington Post, "Report: Polish minister says US ties worthless":

WARSAW, Poland — A Polish magazine said Sunday it has obtained recordings of a conversation in which Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski says the country’s strong alliance with the U.S. “isn’t worth anything” and is “even harmful because it creates a false sense of security.”

In a short transcript of the conversation, a person identified as Sikorski by the magazine Wprost tells former finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, that Poles naively believe the U.S. bolsters their security. Using vulgar language, the person argues that such beliefs are nonsense, and that the Polish-U.S. alliance alienates the Russians and Germans. There has been no official confirmation that it is Sikorski who speaks in the conversation.

Wprost last week set off a political storm in Poland with the release of a recording of a conversation between central bank head Marek Belka and Interior Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz. In the recording the two discussed how the bank could help the governing party win re-election in 2015, an apparent violation of the bank’s independence.

That publication has already threatened to bring down the government of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the new recording is expected to add to the troubles. Although the latest conversation doesn’t reveal any illegal actions, the strong language and opinions would likely put the foreign minister on the defensive if they are confirmed to be true.

And the Guardian UK's got the dishy quotes, "Report: Polish minister says US ties worthless":

A Polish news magazine said on Sunday it had obtained a secret recording of Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, in contention for a senior European Union job, saying that Poland's relationship with the United States was worthless.

The Wprost news magazine said the recording was of a private conversation earlier this year between Sikorski and Jacek Rostowski, a member of parliament with the ruling Civic Platform who until last year was finance minister.

The magazine did not say who recorded the conversation, or how it obtained the recording.

Aides to Sikorski and Rostowski said they had no immediate comment. A government spokeswoman said it was hard to form a view based on a few excerpts of a conversation, but there might be a comment later.

According to a transcript of excerpts of the conversation that was published by Wprost on its Internet site, Sikorski told Rostowski: "You know that the Polish-US alliance isn't worth anything."

"It is downright harmful, because it creates a false sense of security ... Complete bullshit. We'll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we'll think that everything is super, because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers."

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

Poland and the #Ukraine Crisis

Putin's making Ukraine's neighbors anxious, especially Poland.

An interesting piece from Professor Padraic Kenney, at the New York Times, "Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine":

The phrase "Poland mobilizes its military forces to the border" does have the ring of historical significance to it. #WorldWar2

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 2, 2014

For the last quarter-century — the first time in modern history — Poles have not faced an existential threat from the East. But within living memory, Poland lost its eastern provinces when Hitler and Stalin carved it up in 1939; in 1945, the loss became permanent in a redrawn Poland that now included former German lands. So invasions, dismemberments and wholesale remappings of nations are not implausible to Poles. The idea that Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, could simply send his troops to occupy and effectively annex territory from Ukraine without real provocation may have seemed fantastical from farther away, but not from Warsaw.

Keep reading.