Excerpt:
Bavaria's premier, whose state bore the brunt of recent attacks in Germany, took aim at Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy on Saturday by rejecting her "we can do this" mantra.
The comments from Horst Seehofer, whose Christian Social Union is the Bavarian sister party of Merkel's conservatives, exacerbate the chancellor's difficulty in standing by a policy that her critics have blamed for the attacks and which risks undermining her popularity before federal elections next year.
"'We can do this' - I cannot, with the best will, adopt this phrase as my own," Seehofer told reporters after a meeting of his party.