AMN
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for a partial burqa ban in Germany. Merkel told the CDU
that Germans should expect integration from migrants, underlining her party’s bid to ban certain religious garments worn by some women. The chancellor told delegates that Germany could not tolerate “parallel societies.”
“Full veiling is not appropriate here,” Merkel said.
“The full veil must be banned wherever that is legally possible,” she added, in an apparent acknowledgment of the German constitution’s protections for religious and individual rights.
Though the CDU’s right wing applauded Merkel’s proposal for a limited crackdown on women’s passive
observance of faith in certain spaces and the AfD witheringly endorsed the chancellor’s aping of that party’s policy, other European euroskeptics were, well, skeptical.
“Too late,” Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, wrote on Twitter. “The horse has bolted.”
Opposition pointed out that Germany might have bigger problems to police than women’s clothing. “What hypocrisy! To demand a burqa ban but to studiously conduct arms sales to the exporters of the burqa.” Sevim Dagdelen, a member of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee for the Left party, wrote on Twitter, noting that women who wear burqas or other face coverings such as niqabs often come from the countries that most eagerly buy German weapons.