Merkel says she wants to reduce refugee arrivals in Germany

German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised at a congress of her conservative party on Monday to noticeably reduce the number of migrants entering the country.

Germany has seen about a million asylum-seekers arrive this year. “We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably”, she said, after declaring that “Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and multiculturalism thus remains a living lie”.

Merkel was speaking at a congress of her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Karlsruhe, western Germany.

Merkel appealed to the venerable party’s sense of history, saying that the same strength that allowed it “to rebuild from the rubble of the war to create the economic miracle, and to go from division to a reunified country” would get Germany through the refugee crisis. “We’ll make it, for Germany and for Europe”, she said, using once again the motto – “Wir schaffen das” – she used several time since August.

Ms Merkel conceded that overcoming the problems facing Germany, which has accepted over a million migrants in 2015 alone, amounted to a ” giant task”.

Merkel doesn’t face re-election as party leader at this congress, and despite this year’s tensions still faces no serious rivals. “It was nothing more or less than a humanitarian imperative”, she said.

Reiterating the impassioned remarks she made at the beginning of the refugee crisis in the summer, she told delegates: “We are going to manage this – if there are obstacles to overcome, then we will have to work to overcome them”.

She described the night in September when she made a decision to announce Germany would take in the asylum-seekers streaming into Europe.

Urging her party to believe in itself, she cited Germany’s transformation in the last decade – from sick man to European powerhouse – as proof of what was possible when people embraced change to cope with a huge challenge. To successfully integrate refugees, it was essential to explain to them Germany’s “strong native identity” of non-negotiable values, she said, such as religious freedom and equality of gender and sexuality.

Angela Merkel, a trained physicist with an analytical mindset, likes to appeal to Germans’ logic rather than their feelings when promoting her policy ideas, but she pulled out all the emotional stops Monday to sell her strategy on refugees.

“I can say this because it is part of the identity of our country to do the utmost”, Merkel said.

Recent polls conducted for German media show that 62% of Germans want Merkel to put a fixed limit on refugees, with 36% opposed. Key to this were European measures, she said: common asylum rules, better border controls and “hotspots” in Italy and Greece to register and redistribute arrivals at EU outer borders.

In the event, she laid the debate to rest a few minutes into her keynote speech.