BERLIN - Senior German conservatives sought at the weekend to reassure Germans concerned about a record migrant influx, saying numbers must go down and criminal refugees could be deported as a poll showed support for the bloc slipping.
Some 1.1 million migrants streamed into Germany last year, and regions and communities have complained that they are being overwhelmed. Concerns about crime and security have also mounted since men of north African and Arab appearance assaulted women in Cologne at New Year.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said most refugees from Syria and Iraq would go home once the conflicts there had ended and urged other European countries to offer more help "because the numbers need to be reduced even further and must not start to rise again, especially in spring".
The record influx and associated concerns are taking their toll politically, with support for Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party falling by 2 percentage points to 34 percent in an Emnid survey for Bild am Sonntag.
That was its lowest level in that survey since July 2012, though another pollster has already shown them at 32.5 percent.
In an interview with the same newspaper, Peter Altmaier, who Merkel has tasked with overseeing the government's handling of the refugee crisis, said the government was negotiating with some countries including Turkey about taking back criminal refugees who arrived via non-EU countries.
"That can then mean that such refugees are not deported to their home countries - if civil war is raging there, for example - but rather to the country via which they came into the EU," said Altmaier, who is also Merkel's chief of staff.(Reuters)