Merkel greets Italy quake rescue teams, dog

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi pat Leo, the black Labrador retriever who helped pull out 4-year-old Giorgia Rinaldo from under the rubble of the town of Pescara del Tronto following an quake that ravaged central Italy on Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016, in Maranello, Italy, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016.

She told Süddeutsche Zeitung: “We did not embrace the problem in an appropriate way”. Change is nothing bad.

The chancellor also added that she used the phrase with “deep conviction. and with the awareness that we were dealing with a hard and big task”.

Merkel’s conservatives face heavy losses in two upcoming regional elections, the first on Sunday in eastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and on September 18 in the city of Berlin.

This is due in part to the closure of the Balkan Route across Eastern Europe, and to the EU’s controversial migrant deal with Turkey, which Mrs Merkel personally negotiated. We said we would deal with the problem at our airports since we don’t have any other external European Union boundaries.

A fierce domestic backlash against Merkel’s open-door refugee policy has been fuelled by two terror attacks in Germany this summer, both of which were carried out by refugees linked to the Islamic State militant group.

A politically weakened Merkel not only plunges German politics into a period of deep uncertainty, it increases the scope for further turmoil in the European Union, already struggling to cope with the refugee crisis, the shock decision of Britain to leave the bloc and, crucially, persistent tensions in the vulnerable euro zone.

The rightwing populist AfD party is represented in half of Germany’s 16 state assemblies and looks like to enter two more through elections this month, while Merkel has also faced open rebellion from her conservative Bavarian allies. “I can not deny that”, she said.

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel review the honor guard prior to their bilateral meeting in Maranello, Italy, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. She said such a decision would be taken in consultation with the government and local officials.

Countries that had looked to German leadership during the eurozone debt crisis would largely ignore Berlin’s demands for them to share the refugee burden under a binding quota system. On Sunday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the anti-immigrant AfD could win more support than Merkel’s CDU for the first time ever in a state vote.

She said she had never intended “we can do it” to become a slogan.