Angela Merkel and Robert Fico. (source: SITA)
On September 5, 2015 German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her country would be willing to take in thousands of refugees that were detained in Hungary. "Europe's current policy toward asylum seekers is not working," she said that day. "This entire system will have to be overhauled.”
Even those who disagree with the solutions she then tried to implement, would admit that European asylum policy needed fixing then — and still does now. Merkel, and others, sought quotas to help distribute the burden of refugees more evenly. "All of Europe will have to be put to the test according to the size and economic power of each country,” she said last year.
That did not work. Politicians from Central Europe led opposition to the quota policy, which was approved at the European Union level, and now like to point to its failure as proof of their own wisdom. In fact their refusal to implement the plan sabotaged it before it began. This is sort of like predicting your team will lose a football match, refusing to show up to the stadium for kickoff and then using that to demonstrate your prediction was correct.
