It's a bold statement from a leader whose refugee policies have been hit hard by terrorist attacks in recent months.

Two of the attacks — an ax attack near Wuerzburg that wounded five and a suicide bombing in Ansbach that injured 15 — were claimed by the Islamic State.

AD

And in both cases, the attackers were asylum seekers who died in the commission of their crimes.

AD

Under Merkel, Germany has taken in a huge number of refugees and migrants. As many as 1 million asylum seekers arrived in the country in 2015 alone. The German chancellor's open attitude to refugees initially found wide praise, but growing frustration at the difficulties of integrating this mass of people — not to mention the perceived terrorism risks — appear to have hurt her popularity.

One recent poll showed the chancellor's popularity dropping to 47 percent in the aftermath of those two July attacks, a significant drop for a leader who has long been one of the most popular in Europe. Anti-refugee leaders have used these numbers to attack her. U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump singled out Merkel as an example of what an American leader should not be.

AD

"In short, Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel," Trump said of his rival in the U.S. presidential election, "and you know what a disaster this massive immigration has been to Germany and the people of Germany — crime has risen to levels that no one thought they would ever see."

AD

German officials took the rare move of pushing back against Trump's comments, releasing data showing that crime appeared to have declined rather than increased in the first quarter of this year. The figures also showed that the rate of criminality among immigrant communities was no higher than that among Germans.

Merkel's suggestion that extremism predates the refugee crisis is broadly true. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a key figure in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, was a German citizen who had been based in Hamburg. The deadliest Islamist-inspired terrorist attack on German soil occurred in 2011, when two U.S. airmen were killed at Frankfurt Airport by Arid Uka, a man of Kosovo Albanian descent who had lived in Germany since 1991.

AD

An attack in Munich last month in which a gunman killed nine people and then shot himself was found to have no link to Islamist extremism.

AD

That's not to say that migrants don't represent some level of terrorism risk. According to the Associated Press, Merkel conceded that point Thursday, admitting that “it can be seen that there are attempts to win over refugees (for terrorism), or we had the case of Paris, where refugees were deliberately smuggled in by IS."

It is believed that at least some of the perpetrators of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, in which at least 130 people were killed, had used refugee routes to get into Europe.

Merkel's responses suggest that she views anti-immigrant sentiment as potentially dangerous, too. Germany has a long history of far-right attacks, and many far-right groups have adopted fervently anti-Muslim or anti-migrant views. The Islamic State itself has published scores of texts that attack refugees who abandon its self-proclaimed caliphate; the group seems to relish any opportunity to stoke anti-refugee sentiment in Europe.

Merkel's appearance at the campaign event may also have been a pushback against the rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant party that is expected to do well in upcoming regional elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.