Forty percent of Germans are apparently not satisfied with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy and want her to resign, according to a recent poll.
The Insa survey for Focus magazine polled 2,047 German citizens from January 22-25, Reuters reported.
However, 45.2 percent of Germans said Merkel’s migrant policy was not the reason for her to leave her post.
Merkel has come under fire for her welcoming policy toward refugees, who have recently arrived in Germany in unprecedented numbers. However, she claims that the country can cope with the 1.1 million that arrived in 2015, and potentially more in 2016.
One of the issues that probably contributed to Merkel’s falling popularity is the recent sexual assaults against women by refugees across Germany.
The first city to report mass sexual harassment was Cologne. According to eyewitnesses, “heavily intoxicated” men of “Arab or North African” origin were harassing and assaulting local women in the city center on New Year’s Eve.
Similar cases have been reported in other German cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Police were accused of covering up the attacks.
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State Interior Minister Ralf Jager said more than 1,200 people fell victim to attacks on New Year’s Eve in German cities, with more than a half of them suffering sexual assaults.
On Tuesday, Merkel’s Bavarian allies sent her a letter threatening to take the German chancellor to the Constitutional Court if the federal government fails to secure the country’s borders and reduce the influx of asylum seekers.
“If we fail to decrease the number of refugees coming to Germany every day, we must expect another million asylum seekers or more to come next year,” Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said.
Earlier, the head of a Bavarian district sent a busload of more than 30 refugees to Merkel’s Berlin office, saying his district could no longer accommodate them.