Greifswald, Germany (dpa) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned to her constituency on the Baltic coast on Saturday, her first visit in months, amid a deepening crisis over refugee arrivals.Merkel attended the party conference of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the town of Grimmen in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and defended her position on refugees.Merkel said the reaction in the European Union to the flood of refugees from conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan had been disappointing. "There is no fair way of sharing the burden," she said.If Europe wanted to be truly united, then all 28 member states had to take the idea of solidarity seriously and not just four or five.The chancellor reiterated her increasingly controversial position that the challenges of the refugee crisis could be oversome."We can do it," she repeated, a stance that has drawn criticism from within her party and more vocally from her Bavarian allies in the CDU‘s sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).She said that with 60 million refugees worldwide this year, the task was a global one.From just over 200,000 asylum applications in 2014, Germany is expected to receive at least 800,000 this year, with may experts placing the figure well over a million.Merkel‘s constituency has been finding it increasingly difficult to accommodate the rising number of refugees.
