In September the German public finally had an opportunity to vent their feelings about what their Chancellor had done to their country. Voters in Berlin gave the CDU the lowest electoral results in the capital, winning just 17.5 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile the AfD entered the state capital’s Parliament for the first time after receiving a 14.1 per cent share of the vote. This meant that the new party was represented in most of the country’s regions. The AfD’s particularly strong showing in the former East Germany tended to be ascribed to the comparatively lower socio-economic conditions there. Other factors – such as the possibility that like the rest of eastern Germany its inhabitants remembered something their Western compatriots had forgotten – were rarely even discussed in the media at large. What the Chancellor had done was somehow deemed to be right, and anyone who thought otherwise – including the public – must have some strange temporary reason for not yet seeing this.

These results did, however, manage to wrest a rare concession from the former East Germany’s most famous daughter. That month she made what was hailed across the world’s media as a ‘mea culpa’. In fact, the words she used after her party’s collapse in Berlin were some way short of that. ‘If I could, I would rewind time by many, many years,’ she said, ‘so that I could better prepare myself and the whole government and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation that caught us unprepared in the late summer of 2015.’ But of course the situation had not caught them unprepared. Germany – like every other European country – had been experiencing mass immigration for years. It had been experiencing for decades a breakdown of its border controls, a laxness in repatriations of failed asylum seekers and a failure to integrate new arrivals. So much so that Merkel herself had conceded as much in 2010. If the ‘multiculturalism has failed’ speech had been anything other than words, it should have given Germany a head start in preparing for the integration tsunami that would come five years later. But it didn’t, because it had indeed only been words.