Germany expects fewer than 300000 refugees this year

German Chancellor Angela Merkel chats with a girl during a welcoming ceremony at Nizip refugee camp near Gaziantep, Turkey, April 23, 2016.

They also negotiated an agreement with Turkey to limit the numbers crossing, shut the Balkan route used by hundreds of thousands, and tried to speed up deportations of rejected asylum seekers.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice chancellor, said the influx was still a record number and that Merkel had “underestimated” the challenge of integrating new arrivals and finding them jobs.

Germany’s top migration official predicts that fewer than 300,000 refugees will come to the country this year, a sharp drop compared with the height of the migrant crisis in 2015. On Friday in Warsaw, she appeared alongside leaders from the Visegrad Four countries – Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary – which have criticized her open-door policy for refugees. Bild am Sonntag didn’t provide a margin of error for the survey of 501 voters, conducted August 25 by the research firm TNS Emnid.

According to the Emnid poll for the Berlin-based Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday, 50 percent of Germans are against Merkel’s serving fourth term in office after a federal election next year.

Der Spiegel reported that Merkel had originally planned to announce in spring 2016 whether she would stand for election but cited CDU sources as saying the delay to next spring was needed as Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) – the CDU’s Bavarian sister party – did not want to decide until then whether his party will support Merkel again.

Overall, 2,901 people have died or disappeared crossing the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2016, most along the risky central route to Italy – a 37 percent increase over last year’s first half, according to the International Organization for Migration.

More than 58,000 people remain stuck in the financially struggling country, most hoping to continue north to nations like Germany or Sweden.