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I do not think that Merkel was that cynical. Also, she reigned for 16 years, most of them before she made the decision to let in refugees in 2015.
The Iraq war was unpopular in Germany from the get-go, and was certainly a reason why Schroeder (whose SPD is a very established party, btw) won one election with the promise not to take part in that adventure.
And Merz would gladly personally drown any number of refugees in the Mediterranean sea if it would increase his popularity.
The CDU today is not in a better position than they were ca 2014. So they would have to have been clever enough to make a 5d chess move (and under their own name, no less, instead of letting the SPD win an election and take the full blame for opening the borders), but stupid enough not to anticipate the outcome.
I don't know, I think at least on an intuitive level she was more than cynical enough. There were many adjacent justifications that she could have told herself and her party allies to rationalise it - a real sense of compassion, and the need to get workers to fill low-level jobs in the face of dipping birth rates (which when you think about it really is almost a flip side of "stop leftists from being able to drive a hard bargain for cushy jobs").
Moreover, I think there was another semi-cynical reason in play for Merkel in particular, which was their ongoing conflict with the European South about austerity (a Merkelian pet project if there ever was one). By inviting all the refuges (who came via many of the same Southern countries) to Germany, she simultaneously piled up Germany's karma supplies (in the eyes especially of those who were starting to feel uneasy about the resentment their policy was inspiring in their southern neighbours), created a concrete debt (since per normal asylum rules many of those refugees would have been the responsibility of Spain/Italy/Greece where they first entered the European mainland) and an implicit threat if they keep resisting German demands (Germany doesn't have to take all those refugees off their hands).
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