Throughout 2016, as Europe’s political and societal plates moved, the leadership of Europe continued on the same inexorable course. By the summer of that year the deal with Turkey had slowed the migration through the Greek route with the result that there was an upsurge of movement into Italy. That August 6,500 migrants were rescued by the Italian coastguard in the waters off Libya on a single day. The coastguard carried out more than 40 rescue missions just 12 miles from the Libyan town of Sabratha. The passengers on the boats – mainly from Eritrea and Somalia – cheered as they were picked up. By now the people smugglers did not even bother to fill their boats with sufficient fuel to get even halfway to Lampedusa. Knowing that they would be intercepted earlier by European rescue vessels, the people smugglers were filling the boats with enough fuel only to reach the rescue vessels. The Europeans took over from there.8

The politicians continued to pursue the same policies and import more and more people into what they themselves had recognised as a failed model. But everywhere in Europe the public attitudes had begun to change. In July 2016, less than a year after Chancellor Merkel’s grand gesture, a poll found that less than a third of native Germans (32 per cent) still believed in the concept of the Willkommenskultur and continuing mass immigration into their country. A third of Germans as a whole said that the country’s very future was threatened by the migration and a third believed that the majority of migrants were economic migrants rather than actual refugees. Even before the country’s first suicide bombing and other terror attacks in the summer of 2016, half of all Germans strongly feared terrorism as a result of the influx. Perhaps most interesting was the finding that among foreign-born Germans just 41 per cent wanted to see a continuation of mass immigration, with 28 per cent wishing it to end completely. In other words Merkel had even lost the approval of migrants for her migration policy.9

By the following month her approval rating had slipped from 75 per cent (where it had been in April 2015) to just 47 per cent.10 A majority of Germans now disagreed with their Chancellor’s policies. In September’s regional elections in Pomerania, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), though only three years old, beat Angela Merkel’s party into third place. Such results were reported as metaphorical earthquakes, but they were in fact the smallest tremors and did not necessarily signify any major change. The European publics had been opposed to mass immigration from the moment it had started to happen. But none of their political leaders from any political persuasion had ever cared to reflect on the fact or change their policies as a result of it. Although Chancellor Merkel had sped up a process, it was only part of a continuum that the continent had been on for decades. The effects of all this occasionally became startlingly clear.