Who now remembers Reem Sahwil? A Palestinian teenager who, in 2011, had arrived in the German coastal city of Rostock from a Lebanese refugee camp, Reem was among a group of school students addressed by Angela Merkel in July this year. She explained to the chancellor that her family was facing deportation.

In response, an unmoved Merkel replied, “Politics is hard sometimes. There are thousands and thousands more in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. And if we say ‘you can all come here,’ ‘you can all come over from Africa,’ we can’t cope with that.” When Reem burst into tears, Merkel hesitated momentarily, tried to hug her, then awkwardly stroked her arm. The hashtag #merkelstreichelt (Merkel strokes), along with images mocking the petting chancellor, went viral.

It was a peculiar and pathetic scene, but in a sense unremarkable. Merkel leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a party that (with its Bavarian twin, the CSU) has for decades constituted the chief organizing center of anti-refugee bigotry and Islamophobia in the country. In 1980–81 the CDU-CSU instigated a campaign that branded refugees — many of whom were fleeing civil wars in Lebanon and Ethiopia and a military coup in Turkey — “bogus” and “welfare-scroungers.”