Angela Merkel admits Germany, EU bungled refugee crisis

“There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment — and in Germany we ignored both the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution,” Merkel said, according to a translation from Reuters.

She said the European Union had “rejected a proportional distribution of the refugees” when the problem first became apparent. Germany has taken in more than 1 million refugees, but the EU had let each country come up with their own plan at first.

But then Merkel acknowledged that the continent failed to properly handle the migration. “We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way,” she said. “That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area.”