German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing some hard times. A little under two months after being named TIME's Person of the Year for her handling of Europe's refugee crisis, her approval rating has declined to 46 percent - the lowest it has reached in more than four years.
As about eight of 10 people in Germany feel the government has lost control of the refugee crisis, her "open-door" asylum policy to migrants from the Middle East and North Africa is being scaled back. Germany took in roughly 1.1 million refugees in 2015 - the most of any country in the EU.
"Merkel has become a prisoner of her own politics," Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at Mainz University, told The Washington Post. "I think the likelihood is about 60 percent that her policies don't work out and she throws in the towel."
Now, the German Parliament is poised to vote on a series of plans approved by the German cabinet which tightens restrictions on refugees entering the country. The plan includes the exclusion of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from Germany's asylum list, designating the three North African countries as safe states. This means that not only are refugees from those three nations restricted from entering the country as refugees, but any who are already in Germany now face deportation, according to The Guardian.
Other facets of the plan include a two-year ban on family reunification and a measure that requires asylum seekers to pay a fee from their government-provided stipends to cover the price of integration courses.
These developments come not just after Germany received a record number of refugees in 2015, but also as the direct fallout of the New Year's Eve attacks in Cologne. That night, hundreds of men of North African and Middle Eastern descent reportedly broke up into groups and robbed and sexually harassed German woman around the main train station in Cologne, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Police did little and many reports were suppressed due to the political ramifications of the incidents and the fear that they could be used to incite xenophobic sentiment. These fears played out when the public and media caught wind of the events, though its likely they would have either way, and now Merkel finds herself at her lowest rating since the Eurozone economic crisis of 2011.
"I don't think there is any question anymore," said Werner J. Patzelt, a political analyst at Technical University Dresden. "Angela Merkel is really in trouble."
