Even after the wave of Muslim migrant violence, including over a thousand New Year's Eve sexual assaults and multiple plots and acts of terror, Merkel madly insisted on maintaining the migrant crisis. And now her government tried to put on a little show.
The German government is planning a host of new security measures in the wake of a few violent incidents in Würzburg, Ansbach and Munich. The measures include an increase in police personnel, a central crime unit for pursuing crime on the internet, easier deportation for migrants who have committed crimes, and depriving Germans who join foreign "terror militias" of their citizenship.
"I am convinced that these proposals will increase security quickly," Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in a special press conference in Berlin on Thursday, before adding that all the proposals could be implemented in this legislative period, which ends next fall.
It's of course the deportations that matter and leave it to the Greens to explain why that's an empty production playing to a full house.
Volker Beck said de Maiziere's plans would do little to increase security. In a statement, the Green party's migration spokesman dismissed threatening jihadists with losing their German citizenship as "despairing politicking."
And Beck added that speeding up deportations was not as easy as de Maiziere suggested, not least because many refugees do not have valid papers. "The fact is that not a few embassies simply refuse to issue passports for those affected," he said. "Accusations and tightening residency laws makes precious little difference. We'd be better advised to give all people whose deportations are impossible for actual reasons the prospect of staying."
Sure. Let's give the terrorists a reason to stay. But Beck isn't wrong about the facts. Until Germany, and for that matter America, cease relying on mutual cooperation for deportations, such measures are a joke. Try deporting a Syrian. Or for that matter, in the US, a Haitian.
De Maiziere resisted calls from state interior ministers - and also members of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - to ban the face-covering Islamic dress the burqa in Germany. He called the idea "constitutionally problematic" and added: "You can't ban everything you oppose, and I oppose the wearing of a burqa."
But they can ban criticism of Islam.