Germany will reduce refugee influx, Angela Merkel tells party

Chancellor Angela Merkel says she wants to reduce the number of refugees coming to Germany but is refusing to declare a limit.

In a speech on the opening day of a party congress of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merkel said the refugee crisis – the worst since the Second World War – was “a historic test for Europe”, adding that solving the crisis requires not only national efforts, but also measures at the European and global level.

Facing an internal conflict within her own party ranks over her refugee policy, Angela Merkel tried to find a compromise between her own course and her critics’ positions at her center-right CDU party’s congress in Karlsruhe, which was attended by about 1,000 CDU delegates.

However, Merkel refused to change her general attitude towards the refuge crisis or introduce an upper limit on the potential number of asylum seekers that Germany would accept.

And she chose to hark back to the CDU’s greatest post-war chancellors to explain her actions, name-checking Konrad Adenauer, who led Germany through its post-1945 reconstruction, and Helmut Kohl, on whose watch the country was finally reunited in 1990.

She told her party, Christian Democratic Union, it was “a humanitarian imperative” to let in the refugees who had accumulated in Hungary in early September.

“At the same time, we took up the concerns of people, who are anxious about the future, and this means we want to reduce, we want to drastically decrease the number of people coming to us”, Merkel said. She faces calls to shift her stance from her party’s youth organization, a caucus representing Germany’s small and midsize companies and a lobby for local governments. Merkel has declared that “we will manage it”, but some in her conservative bloc have urged a tougher approach.

The chancellor won a battle with the right-wing of the party in the run-up to the gathering by torpedoing its bid to set a cap on the number of asylum seekers Germany would take in – a proposal she has denounced as immoral and unconstitutional.

At a speech she gave to her party in 2010, Merkel said immigrants were welcome in Germany – but they should be prepared to adapt. All that, she says, will be done with “a friendly face”. We will live up to our humanitarian responsibility.

But she said that it was now necessary to “reduce the number of refugees appreciably” to avoid the country being “overwhelmed in the long run”.

The CDU members gave Merkel a standing ovation, applauding for several minutes after she left the podium.

Merkel doesn’t face re-election as party leader at this congress, and despite this year’s tensions still faces no serious rivals.