Angela Merkel’s "We Can Do It:" Ten Years That Changed Europe
How a single sentence opened borders, silenced dissent, and reshaped a continent.
Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and publicist with Croatian roots from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative networks. He regularly writes for German and international outlets such as JUNGE FREIHEIT, The European Conservative, and various media across the former Yugoslavia.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.
On September 5th, 2015, a German chancellor refused to close her country’s borders. With one act of omission, an act of withdrawal, a suspension of responsibility, Angela Merkel inaugurated a new epoch. The sentence that followed, Wir schaffen das (“We can do it”), was less a policy than a creed. It was a liturgy for a post-political Europe: the abdication of sovereignty, repackaged as compassion.
In the weeks before, the stage had already been set. On August 27th, seventy-one migrants were
found dead in a refrigerated truck abandoned near Parndorf in Austria. The images of suffocation and horror circled the globe, turning migration from a policy issue into a moral emergency.
Days later, Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees quietly suspended the Dublin procedure for Syrians, announcing it would no longer return them to the countries of first entry. What seemed like a bureaucratic notice was in truth a radical break: a signal that Germany had detached itself from the European asylum framework.
By August 31st, Merkel had spoken her sentence to the cameras: Wir schaffen das. Four days later, in a phone call with Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, she decided Germany would not close its border. On the evening of September 4th, the first trains rolled north from Budapest. By the next day, thousands streamed across, cheered at Munich’s central station. That was the moment the dike broke.
Germany did not gain newcomers, it lost the ground beneath its own feet. Once Germany’s borders were suspended, the borders of Europe followed. Schengen, the EU’s border-free zone, already fragile, became a fiction. Hungary built fences, Austria deployed troops, the Visegrád states defied Brussels.
What Merkel called a humanitarian imperative others experienced as a forced experiment in multiculturalism. A single night in Berlin sent tremors through Athens, Warsaw, and Stockholm. What happened on September 5th was not the misstep of one chancellor, but the reprogramming of an entire continent.
At its core, the decision was not only political but theological. In place of the broken authority of parliaments and treaties came a new faith: human rights stripped of borders, compassion stripped of prudence, and hospitality stripped of order. Merkel played the role of high priestess in this new religion, intoning a mantra that had no content yet carried the weight of salvation.
Wir schaffen das was less a sentence than a sacrament. It asked for no debate, only belief. To doubt it was to be a heretic.
Still, one question lingered: who exactly was the “we?” Merkel never asked the German people whether they wanted to bear this burden. There was no referendum, nor a parliamentary vote on suspending the nation’s borders. The “we” did not describe a choice freely made, it imposed a duty silently assumed.
In truth, the sentence might have been more honest if spoken as “you must do it.” What was presented as solidarity was in fact conscription. Merkel had taken an entire people hostage to a decision they never made. A nation found itself bound by a word it had never spoken.
Mass migration proved not to be a passing storm but a new gravitational force. According to official figures, Germany registered nearly one million asylum seekers in 2015 alone, more than the entire population of Frankfurt. Within two years, over two million were receiving welfare benefits under the asylum system.
Municipalities became way stations, gymnasiums turned into dormitories, welfare offices into clearinghouses for identities and documents. The logic of the state shifted: the first duty was no longer to its citizens, but to those who had just stepped across its borders. The official word was “integration.” In reality, the policy resembled absorption without digestion.
On New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the promise of safety collapsed. More than 1,200 women filed complaints after being harassed, groped, and in many cases raped by groups of men who had recently entered the country. Police admitted afterwards that they had lost control of the city center. It was not only a crime scene but a ritual unveiling: a society that could no longer protect its women had lost the core of its authority.
The attacks continued. In July 2016, a teenage refugee attacked passengers with an axe on a
train near Würzburg, injuring four. Days later, in Ansbach, a rejected asylum seeker detonated
a bomb outside a music festival, injuring 15. In December, Berlin witnessed the massacre at
Breitscheidplatz, when Anis Amri, a Tunisian whose asylum claim had been rejected and who
was already known to authorities as a radical Islamist, drove a stolen truck into a Christmas
market, killing 12 and wounding more than 70.
Nor was the violence limited to terrorism. In October 2016, in Freiburg, a nineteen-year-old student named Maria L. was raped and murdered by an Afghan who had already attempted murder in Greece. In 2018, in the eastern city of Chemnitz, a German named Daniel H. was stabbed to death by migrants, sparking mass protests that the government and media recast as “hunts” of foreigners, though no such hunts were ever proven. In August 2025, a sixteen-year-old girl in Friedland was pushed under a freight train by a thirty-one-year-old Iraqi.
These cases were not aberrations. They reflected a broader trend confirmed by government
data. In several German states, migrants account for more than 40 percent of suspects in knife
attacks, though their share of the population is far smaller. Entire police reports speak of “youth gangs” without mentioning that the majority are of migrant origin.
For ordinary Germans, it no longer matters whether an attack makes national headlines; migrant violence has become an everyday risk that shapes how people walk home, whether women go out at night, and how children are warned in schools.
Meanwhile, other structures took hold. In parts of Berlin and Duisburg, Sharia eclipsed the rule of the republic. Clan courts settled disputes, honor outweighed constitutional law, and police entered only with caution. The state no longer ruled all its territory.
At the same time, schools became a mirror of demographic upheaval. By 2025, in more than 1,000 German schools, native children were in the minority. Teachers testified that in some classrooms less than 20 percent of pupils spoke German at home. What had once been theoretical became visible in the schoolyard: the future was already shifting.
Financial strain deepened the fractures. Since 2015, Germany has spent more than 150 billion
euros, roughly the size of an entire year’s defense budget, on asylum, integration, and welfare
programs. In 2023 alone, the federal government allocated 27 billion euros for migration-related expenses, more than the budget of the Ministry of Transport.
Municipalities report that up to one third of their annual budgets now flow into housing and support for newcomers, while swimming pools close, libraries reduce hours, and road repairs are delayed indefinitely.
School principals describe classes of thirty where twenty speak little or no German, yet the funding for extra teachers never arrives. What began as an emergency became a permanent redistribution: from pensions to payments, from the infrastructure of citizens to the maintenance of strangers.
Even citizenship itself was diluted. A German passport once symbolized deep belonging, tested by years of integration and loyalty. Today it is handed out after as little as five years of residence, sometimes less. Politicians boast of record numbers of new citizens, but many Germans quietly ask what their passport still means if it can be acquired more quickly than a driver’s license. What had once marked the culmination of loyalty has been transformed into a voucher, detached from culture and history. The passport was not strengthened, it was devalued.
The financial burden did not stop with migration. It multiplied with the energy crisis after
2022. Once the industrial engine of Europe, Germany saw its energy system unravel. Gas prices quadrupled, factories slowed or shut down, and inflation reached levels not seen in decades. Citizens who had been told for years that “there is no money” for pensions, infrastructure, or schools suddenly watched billions flow to migrants and billions more to foreign wars.
For many, the shock was existential: the Germany of stability and prosperity, the Germany of cheap energy and reliable work, no longer existed. What remained was a state that taxed more than ever, delivered less than ever, and justified the decline as a sacrifice for higher ideals. The sense hardened that the Germany they had known was gone, and that what replaced it was unrecognizable.
A generation has now come of age under this tide. Children who were ten in 2015 are young
adults in 2025. For them, Cologne was never an aberration but the beginning. Their lives are
marked by knife warnings, festival posters advising girls to move in groups, police patrols at
Christmas markets, and classrooms where German is no longer the majority language. They
know no Germany before the tide, only the ebb of trust and the habit of fear.
From the start, the media acted not as guardians but as missionaries. Headlines declared a so-
called Willkommenskultur, a “culture of welcome.” Television showed clapping crowds, and any dissenters were branded as extremists. Cologne was downplayed, Breitscheidplatz relativized, Chemnitz rewritten as myth.
The vocabulary itself was weaponized: asylum critics instead of citizens, populists instead of voters, hate speech instead of dissent. Language was patrolled more tightly than borders. What the media preached, the state enforced.
While millions crossed into Germany unregistered, the government expanded surveillance of
its own citizens. Protests were restricted, online speech monitored, and entire movements placed under observation by the domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz. The paradox was complete: open borders for strangers, closed horizons for natives.
Weakness revealed in 2015 was not only internal. It was geopolitical. Erdogan weaponized migration, threatening to open the gates whenever Brussels displeased him. Russia and Turkey expanded influence in the Balkans and the Middle East, while China deepened its economic footprint. A continent that had once drawn others into its orbit now found itself dependent on outsiders for stability. Merkel’s gesture, hailed as moral triumph, was strategic abdication.
Alternatives existed. Viktor Orbán built fences in Hungary. Austria reintroduced border checks. Denmark’s Social Democrats tightened asylum rules. These choices proved that sovereignty could be defended, that compassion could coexist with order, and that politics still had options. Merkel’s “no alternative” was never fact, it was dogma, designed to make resistance unspeakable by declaring it impossible.
In a political climate where dissent was policed, only one party broke the silence. The Alternative für Deutschland, once a small protest party, became the voice of those who had been told they no longer had one. It did not invent anger or despair, but gave them a ballot, a name, a seat.
In 2017, it entered the Bundestag as the largest opposition party, breaking the monopoly of consensus. Whatever its flaws, it alone was willing to say what others denied: that Cologne was not an exception, that mass migration fractured social trust, and that freedom of speech must mean more than a slogan.
Ten years have passed since Merkel’s sentence. Wir schaffen das has become a curse. Once
presented as strength, it revealed only fragility. Declared as unity, the result was division. Wrapped in the language of compassion, the outcome was chaos.
Schengen is brittle, national borders return, trust between East and West erodes, and Germany’s political map has been permanently altered. The AfD, once dismissed, is now entrenched. Still the question remains: what exactly was it that “we” were supposed to accomplish?
Today, even many who applauded in 2015 admit their error. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Germans now reject Merkel’s decision to open the borders. A majority believes the consequences have been negative for security, for culture, and for cohesion. What was once celebrated as moral greatness is remembered as political folly.
September 5th, 2015 will be remembered as the day the dike broke. A nation surrendered its
sovereignty, and a continent was swept along. The waters have not receded. They have carved
channels, built deltas, and drowned certainties. The Europe that existed before is gone.
What remains is not the task of managing migration but of recovering the political. Germany and Europe must remember that borders are not cruelty, but responsibility. That security is non-negotiable, and that speech must remain free or nothing else matters.
Angela Merkel has since retired from power and published her memoir under the title Freiheit, “Freedom.” The irony is unbearable. For the victims of Cologne, Freiburg, Berlin, Chemnitz, and Friedland, what was taken from them was precisely that: freedom to walk safely, freedom to speak openly, and freedom to live without fear.
To call her legacy freedom is to turn language itself upside down. It is a monument to denial erected in print. Ten years on, the victims have no monument, no protection, and no voice in the official narrative. The book sits on the shelves, but the graves are silent.
The real question is no longer whether “we can do it.” What matters now is whether Europe still possesses the will to survive, and whether it can rise from the waters before it drowns.
For a decade the tide has risen, washing away certainties, swallowing borders, eroding the ground beneath our feet. Whole generations have grown up knowing nothing else.
To rise again will demand more than policies or programs. It will demand the decision to be what we once were, to defend what was entrusted to us, and to speak truth without fear. Either Europe remembers itself, or it will be remembered only as a continent that chose surrender.
September 5th, 2015 was not simply a turning point. It was the day the dike broke.
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Insightful and well written.