Angela Merkel has taken the unusual step of issuing a personal apology to the nation as she performed a U-turn on plans to put Germany under a hard lockdown over Easter following a critical backlash.
Addressing the public at a press conference on Wednesday morning, the German chancellor said the plan to close churches and shops over a five-day period had been her mistake, “and mistakes should be called out as such”.
The reversal came as Belgium reintroduced strict lockdown measures in response to a surge of new coronavirus infections. The government announced that schools would be closed on Monday and residents would have only limited access to non-essential businesses from Wednesday night. Non-essential shops will remain open but customers will need to book appointments. Hairdressers and beauty salons must close until 25 April.
The Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said the variant first identified in Britain was likely to be behind cases increasing 40% in the last week and hospital admissions rising 28% after a long period of relative stability.
In Germany, Merkel said she regretted that her proposal had caused further uncertainty and asked for forgiveness from the public, whose growing frustration with the government’s cumbersome decision-making and glacial vaccine rollout is threatening to damage her party before national elections in September.
Following an acrimonious summit between the chancellor and the heads of Germany’s 16 federal states on Monday, Merkel had announced an extension of the partial lockdown until 18 April, as well as a tightening of restrictions from 1-5 April designed to “break the exponential growth of the third wave”.
The proposals were immediately questioned by epidemiologists, business associations and members of Merkel’s own political bloc.
Under the planned Easter lockdown, all shops and business would have been told to remain shut for five days in a row, while grocery stores were to briefly reopen on Holy Saturday, a proposal that many feared would lead to crowded aisles and super-spreader events in supermarket queues.
Business associations were dismayed, with the president of the German Automotive Industry Association warning it was “unimaginable” to put entire factories on halt in an international networked industry.
Merkel’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, of the Christian Social Union (CSU), criticised the request for churches to hold Easter services online.
The chancellor scheduled an emergency conference call with the heads of the federal states on Wednesday morning in which she conceded that the Easter lockdown had been a mistake.
“If possible, we should correct it in time,” German media reported as saying during the call. “I believe it’s still possible.”
Without the Easter lockdown, critics said, it was unclear what concrete steps the government was taking to stem a third wave of the pandemic, other than through a broad appeal for people to stay within their own four walls as much as possible.
Of other decisions announced on Tuesday, an emergency brake on further reopenings that will apply to areas exceeding 100 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants over a seven-day period remains in place.
Germany, which has been stuck in partial lockdown for over more than four months, has in recent weeks recorded a new rise of cases driven by the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant, which currently makes up more than half of new cases reported in the country.
Infection rates in Germany are still considerably lower than in countries such as France, Italy or Poland, but scientists says failure to curb the pandemic’s growth now could mean hospitals being overwhelmed with new cases by April.
With only 9.5 % of the population having received a jab so far, vaccine-led immunity levels remain too low to halt a third wave at this stage.
Public anger with the slow vaccination rollout and an ever-changing patchwork of restrictions is increasingly directed at Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), whose support in the polls ballooned last spring but has now fallen back to pre-pandemic levels.
A survey by the pollster Forsa published on Wednesday showed the CDU clinging on to first place at 26% but the second-placed Greens in a kingmaker role, with governing alliances with the Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democratic party (FDP) or the leftwing Die Linke all within a touching distance of a majority.
Merkel’s unusually honest apology is likely to win her respect and sympathy, but may not stave off an electoral defeat in the coming months.
Her plan for a Easter circuit-breaker lockdown was meant to be the kind of spectacular measure that would reassert her authority, the weekly Die Zeit wrote. “Instead, she now looks like an amateur who pushes through proposals that sound impressive but haven’t been thought through.”
The leftwing daily taz said Wednesday’s U-turn had confirmed Merkel’s status as a lame-duck chancellor. “The Easter break idea came across as chaotic and crude, and the hasty volte-face 36 hours later doesn’t change that. It looks just as chaotic and crude,” it said.