Yascha MounkVerified account

2) Merkel’s actions during the refugee crisis were far more complex than widely assumed. During the summer of 2015, Merkel was widely panned for not speaking out against a xenophobic attack, and for telling a teenage asylum seeker she couldn’t stay in the country on live TV.

So, lacking a clear legal option for how to keep refugees who had already arrived on European soil out of Germany, Merkel decided to make a virtue out of necessity: convinced that public opinion had swung in favor of refugees, she vowed to keep the country’s doors open.

As soon as Merkel had figured out which way the crowd was headed—and rushed forward shouting, “Follow me!”—the mood shifted. Willkommenskultur (a culture of welcoming refugees) gave way to Fremdenangst (fear of newcomers).

Ever the pragmatist, Merkel corrected course: Though she refused to adopt an upper limit to the number of refugees the country would accept, she struck a series of deals with Greece and Turkey that effectively made it impossible for most migrants to reach German territory.

But publicly, Merkel refused to admit that she had shut the country’s doors or that newcomers did pose real challenges. This made it far easier for the far-right to claim that she was unwilling to deal with real problems, or even that she wanted to “replace” Germany’s population.

In part as a result, the AfD has, under Merkel's watch, become the first far-right movement to establish itself as a firm fixture in the national political system since the end of World War II.

3) Merkel has done virtually nothing to deal with the rise of authoritarian populism around the world, and especially in Central Europe.

Merkel could've built an alliance to stop subsidizing Hungary’s slide towards autocracy with EU funds or even to start proceedings to expel the country if it did not mend its ways. But she stalled—and her CDU even stayed in the same grouping in the European Parliament as Fidesz.