It’s been nearly a year since migrants and refugees started to make their way towards Europe en masse, and the EU doesn’t seem to be any closer to solving what is perhaps the biggest challenge in its existence. The two sides are still basically saying the same as they did when it all began: we need to keep them out or we need to let them in. Oh sorry, the EU decided to give EUR 3 billion to Turkey to assist with efforts to curb the influx of illegal immigrants. That’s a lot of money, right? Well, not really. Germany alone will be spending about EUR 21 billion on handling the crisis and – as you may have guessed – taxpayers are loving it. Especially since they have to thank the open-arms policy of Angela Merkel, who seems to be aiming for a Nobel Peace Prize. I have plenty of friends who live in Germany – both Germans and Hungarians – and these days many of them are starting to worry about the decisions their government is making. There are two reasons for their concerns: as in many of the countries who approached the crisis similarly, parties on the far end of the spectrum are gaining strength and, as we know, Germans have had their experience with the far end. Their other issue is security. We all know what went down in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and a lot of people seem to believe that nothing has really changed since then that would prevent something similar happening again. As a friend of mine put it: the government seems to be more concerned about protecting the migrants than about protecting its own citizens. He thinks that they are worried about political correctness. For those of you who are also worried about political correctness, let me give you an idea where it will lead: in the first US presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday, two anti-establishment and anti-PC candidates hammered the rest of the field. On the Democratic side, socialist – definitely a curse word in America – Bernie Sanders clobbered Clinton, while Trump came away with more Republican delegates than the rest of the field combined.
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