December 20, 2016

Christmas Market Tragedy Hands Merkel Critics Line of Attack

Featuring: Julianne Smith

Source: Bloomberg Politics

Journalist: Patrick Donahue

Chancellor Angela Merkel got an early taste of the kind of reception she can expect from her populist opponents after a truck careened into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people in what her government said was probably a terror attack.

“These are Merkel’s dead,” Marcus Pretzell, chairman of the Alternative for Germany party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, posted on Twitter, eliciting a chorus of rebuttals. A vice chairman of the Social Democrats, Ralf Stegner, called the comment “unbelievable and disgusting.”

The response from the anti-immigration party that’s polling in third place nationally underscores the pressure on the German leader to calm a jittery nation as investigators seek to piece together the background to the presumed attack in the capital.

Read the full article at Bloomberg Politics.

Author

  • Julianne Smith

    Former Adjunct Senior Fellow, Transatlantic Security Program

    Julianne (“Julie”) Smith is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy, where she coedits “Shadow Government.” She is also a senior advisor at WestExec Advisors, an adjunct senio...