Now Angela Merkel says she will send 100,000 migrants back to war-torn countries after finally admitting Germany is struggling to cope
With election next year, the German Chancellor changes tune about her mass migration
ANGELA MERKEL has announced an extraordinary u-turn on her on her controversial open-door migrant policy - by vowing to send 100,000 packing.
Faced with voter backlash and the strain of bankrolling a vast number of migrants, Germany's Chancellor appears to have ditched her defiantly welcoming pose.
Speaking at a political conference in Neumünster last night, she said she expects 100,000 migrants to leave Germany this year - with a third forcibly removed.
She said: "If state governments refuse to forcibly deport migrants, then of course everyone will say, 'I will not do this voluntarily, because they will not do anything anyway’.”
She added: "It cannot be that all the young people from Afghanistan come to Germany.”
Mrs Merkel has been allowing a migrants from not only Afghanistan but also across Africa, Albania, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East to travel through Europe to Germany to make asylum applications.
Numbers accelerated last year shortly after news reports were broadcast of mostly young men succeeding to get across borders from southern Europe on the way to the richer north west.
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This trend turned Germany into the second biggest immigration destination after the much larger US, with more than a million piling in during one year alone.
Despite concern among her people, Mrs Merkel stuck with her open-door policy.
But following a wave of sex assaults and two terror attacks in Bavaria carried out by refugees she has changed her tack.
For with an election looming next year, she fears voters will desert in droves to the right-wing Alternative for Germany which campaigns for immigration curbs.
There has been catastrophic local election results for her ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.
It was trounced by the populist Alternative fur Deutschland in both her home state and in the capital Berlin.
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