No tax hikes during refugee crisis, Germany’s Merkel says
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the growing number of asylum-seekers entering Germany will not lead to tax increases.
Merkel made the statement during an interview with the Berlin-based daily Bild on Sunday, but the full interview will not be published until Monday.
"We are lucky that we have been economically prudent for years and that our economy is currently strong," Merkel said in a comment made available to DPA.
Her comments came as the debate on refugees was heating up in the EU country. Germany is the top choice for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers heading to Europe from war-ravaged regions in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
Merkel herself has been coming under intense political pressure by members of her own government for how she has treated the issue of refugee arrivals in Germany.
Political parties within the coalition government of Merkel recently called on her to close the German borders to asylum-seekers, as they believe the country cannot handle the large influx. She has also been accused of being behind a campaign to raise the current national tax rates.
Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), accused fellow members of the coalition government, Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and other parties of being "helplessness" amid the crisis.
Everyone knows that Germany is not able to take more than one million asylum seekers each year "unconditionally and permanently," Gabriel told reporters on Sunday, adding that “Angela Merkel knows this too, but she doesn't say it.”
According to official forecasts, the arrival of asylum seekers in Germany this year stood at 800,000 while rival political parties were expecting more than 1 million.
Many of them have complained about their conditions in European refugee camps.
'Disgrace for Germany'
In the German island of Usedom, located in the Baltic Sea, arsonists on Sunday carried out an attack on a building intended to be used as a refugee shelter. Police later said in a statement that no one was injured and that there was only minimal damage to the building, but gave no further information.
Authorities also reported that in the eastern German town of Gera, three drunken men carrying a pellet gun and a knife entered a temporary refugee shelter. Their weapons were later confiscated after they were forced out of the camp.
German interior minister Thomas de Maizière said Saturday that his department has registered 493 attacks on refugee shelters so far this year, three times more than the assaults recorded in 2014.
He added that the “massive rise in xenophobic attacks against asylum seekers,” ranging from arson to racist graffiti, is a “disgrace for Germany.”
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