"Currently, we are living the social tourism of refugees - into Germany, back to Ukraine." It seems that the CDU's friendship with Ukraine is over. All this was aired by the press on World Tourism Day.
"At the moment, we are living the social tourism of refugees - into Germany, back to Ukraine, into Germany, back to Ukraine." This was not said by an activist of a far-right, Putin-affiliated organization that also wears the letter Z on its boots, but by the president of Germany's leading center-right opposition party, Friedrich Merz, on Bild TV. The party chairman emphasized that the CDU "already warned in the spring that this problem could arise", but the government "pretended to be deaf".
The statistical data do not testify to real social tourism - in the framework of which Ukrainians come in droves to Germany to collect the social benefits due to refugees, and then happily live off them in Ukraine Friedrich Merz's goal was probably not to raise a real and serious problem. Your comment says more that
anti-Ukrainianism has appeared in German society to such an extent that it is worth riding even for centrist parties.
It is no wonder that the Greens, with the most militantly pro-Ukrainian voting base, were the first to jump on Merz's statement. Ricarda Lang, co-president of the Greens, raised the question, "how does Friedrich Merz's talk of "social tourism" in the context of people fleeing this terrible offensive war fit in with the CDU's often cited solidarity with Ukraine?"
On behalf of the government, Nancy Faeser, the Minister of the Interior, responded, who wrote, "It is despicable to create a mood on the account of Ukrainian women and children fleeing from Putin's bombs and tanks. "Social tourism" was the worst word of the year in 2013, and it is still unworthy of every democrat in 2022".
Former State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Michael Roth, SPD chairman of the Bundestag's foreign affairs committee, also reacted. According to him, "There is a terrible war going on in Ukraine! The wording about social tourism destroys social cohesion, which we experienced earlier in the support of Ukraine and the reception of refugees. Anyone who says this has zero sense of responsibility and empathy."
In addition, the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, Andrij Melnik, who was fired a few months ago along with Ljubov Nepop, who was accredited to Budapest, and who will soon be returning home, could not remain silent on the topic, who commented on Merz's comment: "WTF? Where does this insanity about the alleged "social tourism" of Ukrainian war refugees come from? They have the right to visit their country at any time.
Where does this cheap populism come from? Holy nipple!”
The ambassador also provided Merz with a link to the German Federal Office for Migration and Asylum (BAMF) information on the rights of refugees from Ukraine.
Source: mandiner.hu
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