Over the last decade, Germans have greeted New Year’s Eve with more and more trepidation. On what is meant to be a day of celebration, in Germany it shines a light on something much uglier: the country’s failed migration and integration policies.
This year, violence against police and firefighters, especially in Berlin and other cities, broke out. Unfortunately, the German government is attempting to deflect from the uncomfortable truth that non-integrated migrants and asylum seekers tend to be at the centre of these incidents. This was exemplified by the reporting of one of the largest public broadcasters and the German Police Union who claimed that it is “difficult to talk about perpetrators because these are group dynamic processes as a consequence of the pandemic” — carefully avoiding any mention of the demographic groups involved.
