German Chancellor Angela Merkel was heckled by protesters during her final campaign rally in Munich on Friday, before the weekend’s federal elections.
Angela Merkel, German Chancellor (German): “What happened in 2015 cannot, must not and will not be repeated [refugee crisis]. We have learned from the incidents that occurred back then. We know that we did not pay sufficient attention to some details back then. Back then, millions of people who lived in refugees camps Jordan, Lebanon and in parts of Turkey and Syria itself, also in Iraq, could not receive support by international aid organisations, because they [the organisations] did not have enough money. Ladies and gentlemen, if a family has less than 1 euro per day to spend on each family member, if the children don’t have enough opportunities to get even a little education, then, my ladies and gentlemen, people take a dangerous journey and put themselves into the hands of traffickers. Thousands have lost their lives. And therefore today that means for us that we need to supply international relief organisations with money in order to help the people at the scenes, close to their homelands.”
Angela Merkel, German Chancellor (German): “And that’s why we will also strongly focus on development aid in the coming years, but we will also focus on combatting illegal migration, protecting our exterior borders, and keeping the national border controls in place as long as the exterior borders are not sufficiently protected, my ladies and gentlemen.”