In the small town of Gräfenhainichen in East Germany, you can now dance on abandoned coal mines, with retired machines serving as the backdrop for occasional music festivals. These machines will never operate again, a casualty of Germany’s effort to move away from coal and transition to a low-carbon economy.

Since the 1990s, successive German governments have set ambitious goals to go fossil fuel free. The country currently gets more than 26 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower. By 2050, it aims to bump that ratio up to 80 percent. Making this task even more challenging, Germany wants to get there without relying on nuclear power. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, the country reiterated its commitment to phasing out all its existing reactors.

Brown and black are still the dominating colors in Germany’s power mix (http://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de)

German politicians speak enthusiastically about this ongoing green revolution, dubbed the Energiewende (or “energy transformation”), as a model for tackling climate change. The country is sometimes held up as a template for President Obama’s own efforts to reduce coal-fired power and green the US electricity supply.

What gets less attention, however, is how frustrating and difficult Germany’s energy turnaround has been in practice. The country offers a cautionary tale on why going green isn’t always as smooth a ride as thought, and its Energiewende can offer some valuable lessons for the United States.

Germany has grand plans to phase out fossil fuels

Solar Panel Park in southwest Germany — everything’s fine, as long as the sun shines. (Getty Images)

Germany’s efforts to wean itself off fossil fuels and shift toward cleaner forms of energy date back to the late 1990s, when the Green Party came into the government for the first time and worked with Social Democrats to introduce a series of taxes on oil and other forms of energy (though coal was notably exempted).

Over time, these policies expanded. When Angela Merkel, the country’s former environment minister, became chancellor in 2005, she made climate change a signature issue. And in 2011, after the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan, the clean energy push gained renewed momentum. The government vowed to phase out the country’s 17 existing nuclear reactors (which at the time provided nearly 23 percent of electricity) by 2022, all the while ramping up renewable electricity and cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This Energiewende includes a variety of policies, but at the center are generous subsidies for renewables — including a policy known as “feed-in tariffs.” Anyone who installs solar panels or wind turbines is guaranteed a fixed, above-market price for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they feed into the grid. (That subsidy shrinks over time, to drive cost reductions in the industry.) What’s more, by law, utilities must draw on renewable sources for electricity before resorting to coal, gas, or nuclear.

These policies had a massive effect on the wind and solar industry, with installations quadrupling since 2000, when the feed-in tariffs began:

At this point there are 25,800 wind turbines in Germany, with an additional 1,000 being installed each year. The country is currently planning 1,800 miles of additional power lines to accommodate all this renewable growth. The government has also poured billions into R&D for modern energy technologies, as well as financial support for things like electric cars or home retrofits.

As renewables have matured, the German government has made plans to shut down its fossil fuel and nuclear plants. By 2019, the last state-subsidized hard coal plant is supposed to close (lignite coal plants will persist for longer). By 2022, the last German nuclear plant is supposed to shut down.

These clean energy policies haven’t come cheaply. The subsidies for renewables are paid for by a surcharge on German electricity bills, which currently come to around $240 per household per year, according to a report by the German Association of Energy and Water Resources. German electricity rates are still among the highest in Europe, although efficiency programs have kept overall household bills roughly flat as a share of household income.

Still, the cost of green energy isn’t the biggest hurdle in Germany’s transition — wind and solar remain quite popular nationwide. The bigger challenge is getting rid of coal.

Germany's coal industry has refused to disappear without a fight.

Protest by German coal miners in the 1980s: They carry a symbolic coffin with the sign “Mine workers have enemies — dumb politicians.” (Getty Images)

The crucial part of Germany’s energy transition was supposed to be phasing out coal, a major contributor to climate change. But that turned out to be much harder than anyone thought.

Coal still provides 43 percent of Germany’s electricity, with 25 percent coming from lignite (known as “brown coal”) and 18 percent from hard coal. Lignite is dirtier from a climate change perspective, producing about one-third more carbon dioxide than hard coal, but Germany has ample domestic lignite reserves and can mine it cheaply. The hard coal mostly gets imported from abroad, from Russia, Colombia, and the United States.

Both types of coal have proven difficult for Germany to give up. In 2013, Germany was burning more lignite than at any point since 1991. Those numbers have since gone down slightly in subsequent years, but phasing out coal has been stubbornly slow:

German energy resources over the years (Carbon Brief)

There are a couple of reasons for that. Hard coal is still cheaper than most alternatives, and unlike solar or wind can provide a reliable source of electricity for Germany’s factories and heavy industry. Christian Schwägerl, an energy analyst in Berlin, has argued that Germany’s industrial sector is particularly reluctant to give up its reliance on coal: “Germany is Europe’s largest economy, and its wealth depends heavily on exporting industrial goods made with cheap electricity,” he writes.

Meanwhile, many Germans are opposed to abandoning lignite, or brown coal, any time soon. The country is the world’s largest lignite producer, and the prospect of job losses in mining regions is a looming concern.

“Many companies here, and people whose jobs depend on the industry, want to keep the coal,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, who directs the German Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. His institute is based near the Lausitz region, which is highly dependent on lignite mining.

These fears aren’t unfounded — all people have to do is look at what happened to coal regions that declined sharply in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of industry in East Germany, a number of mines had to close. The number of people employed by the mining industry fell from roughly 300,000 in 1990 to around 40,000 today.

Driving around former mining regions in Germany today can be a depressing experience. Some industrial cities have never recovered. “Of course we notice the effects in retail business, gastronomy, and service. People just have less money,” says Karl-Friedrich Schulte-Uebbing, director of the local chamber of commerce in the town of Marl, which has seen major mining-related job losses.

Meanwhile, there’s another much-debated factor behind coal’s stubborn persistence. Many analysts have argued that it’s impossible for Germany to phase out nuclear power and reduce its reliance on coal at the same time. If you shut down reactors, as Germany has been doing, coal will just fill in the gap. Edenhofer, for his part, doesn’t buy this explanation. He argues that the reduction in nuclear power has largely been supplanted by faster-than-expected renewable growth.

Instead, he points to problems with Europe’s emission trading system, or ETS. This program sets an overall cap on the continent’s greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell pollution credits. This is effectively a price on polluting carbon dioxide.

The problem is that permit prices under this system have fallen to ridiculously low levels in recent years. In 2008, it cost $50 to emit one ton of carbon dioxide. After the financial crisis, that plummeted to $7 per ton. That gave a boost to Germany’s coal plants, which were no longer at quite as much of a disadvantage compared with cleaner natural gas plants. “The decline of CO2 prices in Europe has meant that modern gas power stations are now unprofitable, and old coal power plants are now profitable,” Edenhofer explains.

European emission trade system: well-meant but unsuccessful. (Bloomberg)

Indeed, those low permit prices have also raised demand in other countries for German coal-fired electricity. As the think tank Agora Energiewende explains, German electricity exports have been surging in recent years, much of it coal-fired.

While EU officials have suggested modifying the cap-and-trade system to make it stricter, reforms aren’t likely to come about until 2018 at the earliest. And in the meantime, coal is hanging on in Germany. “We’re experiencing a renaissance of coal power,” says Edenhofer.

Germany is now in danger of missing its climate targets

The recent coal boom has put Germany’s plans to tackle global warming in danger. The country is currently aiming for a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2020. But Germany may not hit that target, according to a McKinsey study and several other analyses.

German emission trend 1990 to 2014 and emission reduction targets; data from German Umweltbundesamt, 2015. (Clean Energy Wire)

Since 1990, Germany has only seen a few periods when emissions dropped drastically. The first came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in part because of the collapse of East German heavy industry. The second came in 2009, after the global financial crisis.

But in 2012 and 2013, overall emissions rose again — despite the push for green energy. And although there was another drop in emissions in 2014, even Germany’s environment minister, Barbara Hendricks, conceded that this was mainly due to unusually warm weather that reduced the need for heating. So emissions have been bouncing about, rather than exhibiting a clear and sustained downward trend.

“I am very skeptical that we are currently experiencing a clear downward trend for carbon emissions,” says Edenhofer. He says the 2020 climate target “is still feasible, but it’s a daunting task. It will only happen with fundamental changes.”

And right now, it’s not clear that those fundamental changes are imminent. If anything, the government seems to be softening its stance on coal. The elections of 2013 saw a new coalition government formed with support from mining regions. Its platform argues that lignite will be “indispensable for the foreseeable future.”

Then, over the summer, the government gave the coal industry another reprieve. Back in 2014, the economic ministry had proposed a levy on the oldest and dirtiest coal plants that would spur operators to cut 22 million tons of carbon dioxide. But that proposal sparked widespread protests. Unions cited concerns about job losses. Manufacturers worried about the loss of cheap electricity.

Faced with such opposition, Merkel’s government backpedaled slightly. In July 2015, it unveiled a new proposal to save just 12.5 million tons of carbon dioxide by closing five old coal-fired plants by 2020 — and compensate affected companies to the tune of $260 million annually. “The decision means the coal industry lives on,” commented Nick Butler in the Financial Times. “Coal will remain a major, and probably the largest, fuel source for power generation for another decade and perhaps longer.”

What the US can learn from Germany's war on coal

And it burns, burns, burns: Coal power plant in eastern Germany. (Getty Images)

The United States and Germany are in different situations, energy-wise. For one, the United States has had a relatively easier time phasing out coal in recent years due to the availability of a bridge fuel — cheap natural gas.

From a carbon dioxide perspective, natural gas is only about half as dirty as coal (though still dirtier than renewables or nuclear; plus there are concerns about methane leaks). And natural gas plants don’t suffer from the intermittency problems that wind and solar farms do. So, in theory, gas should be a good candidate to reduce emissions and aid the transition to a carbon-free system.

Since the mid-2000s, the United States has developed ample domestic supplies of cheap natural gas thanks to improvements in fracking and horizontal drilling techniques. Today, gas supplies about 33 percent of the country’s electricity, and it’s a major reason for the decline in coal-fired power. Germany, by contrast, doesn’t have large domestic supplies. It has to get much of its natural gas from Russia, an unreliable source. As a result, the country gets just 9.5 percent of its electricity from gas. That’s made the transition much, much harder.

Yet despite the differences, there are at least two big lessons the United States can take from Germany’s experience as it, too, tries to shift to cleaner energy.

The first is to be careful about optimistic cost projections. Back in the early 2000s, one Green Party politician promised that Germany’s energy turnaround wouldn’t cost households more than “a scoop of ice cream.” That has turned out to be wrong, which in turn has fostered a degree of skepticism about the Energiewende. A few years ago, 56 percent of Germany’s consumers said they were willing to take higher electricity costs for the support of renewables, according to a survey. That’s since dropped to 46 percent.

The other lesson is not to underestimate the resistance from fossil fuel incumbents. Most environmentalists are already aware of this. Coal may be dying in the United States, but coal state lawmakers have been disproportionately influential in energy policy, lobbying hard against President Obama’s plans to reduce power plant emissions. If Germany is any guide, this opposition is only likely to get more fierce — not less — as clean energy advances, and fossil fuels can sometimes end up making a surprising comeback along the way.

• An emergency European Union summit on the refugee crisis ended in disappointment Monday after EU interior ministers were unable to agree on a response to the refugee crisis. EU officials agreed that a total of 160,000 refugees should be distributed across the EU for resettlement, but they failed to reach a final decision on the more important issue of how many refugees each country should take.
• The refugee crisis is the worst that Europe has experienced since World War II, with hundreds of thousands of people arriving at Europe's borders so far this year. An estimated 2,800 people have died trying to reach Europe, including many children.
• The failure to reach a solution to the crisis has left EU border states overwhelmed and refugees in limbo. This situation has tested Europe's ability to function at times of crisis — and so far, it is failing that test.

EU member states agree that 160,000 refugees should be resettled across Europe – but can't agree on how that should happen

Refugees on the Hungarian-Serbian border. (Thomas Campean /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

“We have not reached a decision on quotas and details of relocation,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière announced after the EU emergency meeting in Brussels. He sounded disappointed, and he had every reason to be.

On Monday, a meeting of 28 EU countries produced little more than a vague agreement that 160,000 refugees ought to be redistributed across Europe. That’s fine as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go very far. Recent history shows that without a binding quota system, redistribution won’t happen. In other words, instead of coming up with an effective, binding solution to the refugee crisis, EU nations have simply expanded the existing ineffective solution to cover many more people.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had proposed a system in which each member state would have a mandatory resettlement quota that would be set based on a formula that takes into account each country’s GDP, unemployment rate, population, and the number of asylum applications the country received in the first half of the decade. But that proposal failed. The EU will take up the mandatory quotas again next month instead. “An EU meeting on October 8 will have to bring the regulations concerned with itself,” de Maizière said. “This is a first, important step. But the truth lies in the execution and implementation.”

The EU's failure to find a solution to the crisis threatens its own legitimacy

Police register refugees at a train station in Freilassing, Germany. (Sebastian Widmann/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The refugee crisis — and, by extension, Monday’s summit — tests the EU’s ability to solve EU problems at the EU level, rather than treating them as issues for individual countries to deal with on their own.

The real issue here is whether, when the existence of the EU creates burdens for some countries even as it creates benefits for others, the EU will address that problem collectively, or whether it will leave weaker countries to struggle alone — or whether it will try to ignore the problem in the hope that Germany will solve it by itself.

If that question sounds familiar, it should: The Greek financial crisis raised many of the same issues earlier this summer. In that case, the problem was the way the EU’s common currency burdened Greece and other small economies. In the case of the refugee crisis, the problem is that the EU’s open borders and common labor market mean refugees are often traveling to “Europe,” rather than to an individual member state — but EU rules still treat refugees as a matter for individual member states to handle on their own. It is as if the US had treated last year’s child migrant crisis as a matter for Arizona and Texas to solve by themselves, simply because that was where most of the children crossed the border into the US.

The EU finally reached a solution to the financial crisis last summer, but a solution for the refugee crisis looks far less certain. That threatens core principles of the EU — especially its open internal borders.

Over the weekend, for instance, Germany, which has taken a moral and political leadership role in the crisis in recent weeks, closed its border with Austria, citing “urgent security reasons.” The move seems to have been intended to send a message to other EU countries that Germany is not willing to solve this crisis on its own, and to put the pressure on to find an EU-wide solution at Monday’s summit.

But instead, Germany’s move triggered a domino effect, prompting other EU nations to impose checks at their own frontiers as thousands of refugees pressed north and west across the continent. Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Austria’s interior minister, said Monday that her country would “act like Germany” and establish new controls on its own borders. Slovakia said it would now impose controls on its borders with Hungary and Austria. The Netherlands announced it would make spot checks at its borders. Other EU countries, ranging from Sweden to Poland, said they were monitoring the situation to decide whether controls were needed.

Traffic jams at German border, scenes ‘like the 80s’ after Berlin reimposes border checks http://t.co/f1NbwF0Mv9 pic.twitter.com/FWEPlE2Irh

— The Straits Times (@STcom) September 14, 2015

Europe's refugees desperately need a solution to the crisis

Refugees crossing the border between Hungary and Serbia. (Thomas Campean /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Of course, this is not merely a political crisis for the EU. It is also a humanitarian crisis for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants who have been left in legal limbo and physically perilous conditions while the EU struggles to reach a solution.

In Greece, for instance, the thousands of arriving refugees have been stuffed into squalid, underresourced camps. Earlier this summer, Doctors Without Borders’ Stathis Kyroussis described the current refugee crisis in Greece as the worst he has ever seen: “I have worked in many refugee camps before, in Yemen, Malawi, and Angola. But here on the island of Kos, this is the first time in my life that I have seen people so totally abandoned.” According to Human Rights Watch, the Greek reception centers where arriving refugees are held lack sufficient food and health care, and are so severely unsanitary and chronically overcrowded that the conditions in them may amount to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law.

Conditions are even worse in Hungary. There, the government has herded refugees into metal holding pens that would be more appropriate for livestock than for people. In one such detention center, Röszke, detainees “are held in filthy, overcrowded conditions, hungry, and lacking medical care,” said Human Rights Watch’s Peter Bouckaert, who is currently in Hungary. Last week, a leaked video showed Röszke guards hurling food packets at desperate refugees, many of whom were children.

Until the EU finds a solution to the crisis, those refugees will be left in perilous limbo.

Germany has decided to take leadership of Europe’s refugee crisis. This is no longer just a general observation; meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel says quite openly that without clear guidance, Europe will probably fail to find a way through this historic crisis.

“If we show courage and lead the way, a common European approach is more likely,” she said on Wednesday in a speech to the German parliament. Germany’s “strength and power” in cooperation with its partners, she said, were the key to solving the crisis.

The country has taken in many more asylum seekers than any other EU member. “We have a responsibility, and we perceive it,” Merkel said, not without a touch of pride.

What we are experiencing right now is nothing less than a new, more confident self-conception of Germany. Last week, Merkel pressed other nations in the European Union to do more to share the burden of migration. Before that, Germany had lowered the hurdles for incoming Syrian refugees.

Germany, it seems, wants to be a sort of moral example for other, less committed EU states on this crisis. Whether the rest of the European Union is willing to follow may be decided next week, when the EU leaders meet for a summit on refugee policy. Germany is pressing to impose refugee quotas so that all countries will share the burden, but this idea is unpopular among EU states that would rather resist any requirements.

Earlier this week I spoke with migration expert Yves Pascouau from the European Policy Centre, a think tank based in Brussels, about Germany’s new leadership in the European refugee crisis. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Annett Meiritz: Why is Germany’s stance on the migrant interesting?

Yves Pascouau: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has clearly taken European leadership with respect to the migrant issue. I think she’s been able to do so because German public opinion is pretty much in favor of helping asylum seekers, especially those coming from a country with a civil war like Syria.

Compared with other countries in the European Union, public opinion in Germany is rather supportive toward refugees. There’s an overall situation in Germany that led to a relatively broad political and social consensus about refugees entering Germany.

AM: How would you describe that overall situation?

YP: On the one hand, the German economy is functioning well. Germany also knows it’s going to have an extremely big problem with birth rates declining; immigration is therefore intended to help in principle.

And finally, extreme right parties in Germany aren’t as strong as in other European countries. Even if there are extreme reactions and arson attacks by nationalists and neo-Nazis, those are not as political as in other EU states — for instance in France, where the extreme right is very strong on the political level.

Angela Merkel attending an EU summit in Brussels, in July 2014.

AM: Merkel had been reluctant for some time on refugees, but then suddenly took this big step forward. Did you see that coming?

YP: This move really surprised me. A few weeks ago, the Germans made clear that they want to stick to the Dublin agreement — an EU rule that allowed member states to deport refugees to the EU state where they’d first arrived — and don’t want to move away from that principle. But suddenly the Dublin system has, to a certain extent, imploded, because of a decision the German government made a couple of weeks ago: The country allowed Syrian refugees, who normally would be deported back to wherever they first entered the EU, to stay and apply for asylum.

To say that we are not going to insist on the current rules with respect to Syrian refugees was clearly a way to blow away the Dublin mechanism. Now I think, this mechanism has been fundamentally weakened.

AM: Which other reasons do you see for such a turnaround?

YP: The fact that Angela Merkel moved so quickly and so suddenly had, to a certain extent, something to do with her coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD). There were first two SPD ministers, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had presented a 10-point plan with respect to the migrant crisis.

My reading is that Angela Merkel has seen the Social Democrats were about to gain power and sympathy for this. That was then the moment where she decided to move. As I said, the general context in Germany was supportive to make that move. But the way it has been implemented, I would say, domestic political motives were speeding up things.

Media coverage about Germany’s role in the refugee crisis: “Something we are not used to.”

AM: Something has changed in the general perception of Germany; the country has been praised for its stance on the migrant crisis by the international press lately. How do you explain that?

YP: Ten years ago, on an economic level, Germany was called the “sick man of Europe.” Now it’s the most powerful economy in the EU and one of the top economies in the world. This has had a strong influence on how the world expects Germany to deal with the migrant crisis.

However, a lot of people seem to forget that Germany already had been able to take on a high number of refugees during the Balkan Wars in the 1990s.

Still, the situation is different these days. Now we have a German chancellor strongly speaking extremely tough toward opponents in Germany and Europe, in such a big and open manner. This is perhaps something we are not used to.

AM: I’m curious about the strategic motives behind this development. Is it about more than moral leadership? Could it be a deeper intention to fix the European Union, as Germany tried to do in the financial crisis with Greece?

YP: What we had with the euro crisis was to a certain extent a technical crisis. Now we are facing a humanitarian crisis. The magnitude is extremely high; such a phenomenon we haven’t had for half a century. This is the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. And according to the figures, in the last couple of weeks it’s become clear that the migrant movement will even increase. So it was only a matter of time before an EU leader had to go ahead and step forward.

In Germany, there are 800,000 asylum seekers expected in 2015, more than in any other European country. I think the sheer numbers of refugees also played a significant role in Germany deciding to move ahead.

European migrant crisis by numbers: Some EU members show more commitment, others show less.

AM: Why are some EU countries taking more responsibility, while some take almost none?

YP: This is the million-dollar question; there’s no simple answer. That Sweden and Germany take the most refugees is part of the way they see themselves as immigration countries. Same applies for the UK or France — both have a long history of being immigration countries. But the current political and social climate makes it difficult for their governments to move ahead like Germany does.

Eastern European member states like Hungary or Slovakia don’t share such an immigration history; they are mainly countries of emigration. Those countries have lived under communism for decades. Their societies don’t see themselves as multicultural. They aren’t familiar with the idea of suddenly being asked to receive a pretty high number of asylum seekers.

By the time those countries joined the EU, they were far from considering that one day they might be faced with a huge migrant flow. And now they are forced, to a certain extend, to contribute to a common European future.

AM: Is there even such thing as forcing individual EU members to accept more refugees?

YP: How to distribute migrants fairly is one of the biggest challenges the European Union is going to deal with for a long time. The picture of this poor little boy on the beach has clearly changed the overall mood. Now the public is more aware of the fact that there are actually people dying: men, women, families, children. From my point of view, this has clearly played as a major game changer. Even UK Prime Minister David Cameron has decided to welcome 20,000 additional migrants over the next five years; France and Spain have also agreed to take in more refugees.

Things are changing extremely rapidly on the EU level, and this may well have a big impact on other countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. If some EU members are completely isolated in terms of their asylum policies, the pressure on them increases immensely.

We’ll see after September 14, when the EU leaders meet again, where the European Union stands, whether there will be a common solution or whether the whole thing is going to lead to a dead end.

AM: How optimistic are you that the EU will solve that crisis?

YP: A few of days ago, I was really pessimistic. Now, with the political landscape changing rapidly, I’m far more optimistic.

Forget Texts From Hillary — now it’s all about Selfies With Angela.

On Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spent an afternoon taking selfies with refugees outside a refugee center in Berlin. The resulting photos are remarkable: image after image of Merkel smiling and posing with smartphone-wielding refugees, most of whom look stunned at the realization that their long, dangerous journey to Europe has led them not only to safety in Germany, but to a casual photo op with one of the most powerful leaders in the world.

But fun as they are, Merkel’s smiling asylum-seeker selfies are a lighthearted manifestation of a serious shift in her approach to dealing with refugees in Germany.

Europe is currently experiencing its largest refugee crisis since World War II, and Germany has taken the lead in trying to convince other EU countries to open their borders to refugees and share the burden of receiving and integrating them. But so far, most other countries have responded to the refugee crisis with fear and concern. Merkel’s selfies seem like an effort to combat that fear by humanizing refugees and showing them as smiling individuals rather than a faceless, threatening mass of people.

Merkel's selfies are a way to humanize refugees — and make Merkel herself seem more sympathetic

An iPhone-wielding young man takes a picture with Angela Merkel.

Merkel’s selfies were part of a day-long visit to centers providing services to refugees in the German capital. The chancellor spent time in several different facilities, including an asylum application center, a school that offers special language classes for newly arrived migrant children, and a migrant shelter.

The visit represents a huge shift in tone for Merkel. It is only her second visit to a refugee center in her entire 10-year term — the first was in August, when she visited a center in the town of Heidenau following heavy neo-Nazi riots there. And a few months ago Merkel was sharply criticized for her insensitive response to a sobbing Palestinian refugee girl who begged to be allowed to stay in Germany.

But now that Merkel and the German government are taking the lead in urging European countries to respond humanely to the European refugee crisis, Merkel’s approach has become noticeably friendlier. Between her appointments, she stopped for pictures with the cheering refugees outside.

Next, please!

Her new approach is clearly popular with refugees. According to the German media outlet Berliner Zeitung, among refugees “Merkel is celebrated as a heroine.”

Let’s have at least one more: Germany’s chancellor on a selfie-taking mission.

Of course, solving the refugee crisis will require much more than an afternoon of selfies. And some German media outlets accused Merkel of ignoring the difficulties of the German asylum system in favor of staging photo ops as the “refugee chancellor.”

“The visit is a good sign,” German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung commented on Merkel’s migrant tour, but “it doesn’t change anything.”