The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”
The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs”. When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.
In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up”. Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.