Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has openly criticized her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party for advocating stricter border controls, reaffirming her defense of the open-door migration policy she pursued during the 2015 migrant crisis.
In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Merkel described keeping Germany’s borders open as the morally and politically correct decision, rejecting current CDU plans to reject asylum seekers at the border as both impractical and contrary to European values.
“The idea of setting up water cannons on the German border, for example, was terrible for me and wouldn’t have been a solution anyway,” Merkel said, warning that such measures risk undermining European integration.
