On Sunday Martin Schulz, who is Chancellor Angela Merkel's challenger from the Social Democrat Party (SDP) for the September elections, said in an interview that Germany needs to take action now to prevent a re-run of 2015, when some 890,000 migrants arrived in the country.

In September 2015, Merkel opened Germany's borders to thousands of migrants to avoid a humanitarian disaster – a move that later hit her popularity and boosted the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), although her conservatives have since recovered and support for the AfD has dropped.

Schulz, whose SPD are lagging far behind Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the polls ahead of the Sept. 24 elections, warned against a repeat scenario after more than 93,000 mainly sub-Saharan African and Bangladeshi migrants arrived by boat in southern Italy so far in 2017, up 17 percent from the same period last year.

"The numbers in Italy are worrying – thousands per day," he said in an interview with Reuters in the western German city of Aachen.

Schulz says Germany has to help Italy as it is reaching the limits of how many migrants it can handle. He also says other European Union countries need to help Italy, such as by taking in refugees.

In an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Schulz said the situation was "highly explosive" and suggested he wanted to turn it into an election campaign issue, saying: "Those who play for time and try to ignore the topic until the election are acting in a very cynical way."

According to German Interior Ministry figures, migrant arrivals in Germany have been far lower this year than in the previous two years, with data from the Interior Ministry showing the number of new arrivals seeking asylum fell to 90,389 in the first half of 2017, about half as many as in the period in 2016.

Last year, some 280,000 migrants arrived in Germany – a sharp drop compared to 2015 – and the refugee issue has not yet played a major role in the election campaign.

The latest Emnid poll shows Merkel's CDU with 38 percent and the SPD with 25 percent.

All these figures and arguments are fine. What is sad, however, is that no one in Germany takes the trouble of telling the German people why migrant figures have dropped dramatically in the past two years. No one bothers to say that this is thanks to the efforts of Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey took drastic steps to stem the huge flow of refugees from Syria across the Aegean Sea to the Greek islands. Those migrants would have eventually found their way to northern and central Europe, and especially Germany. Thanks to the refugee agreement signed between Turkey and the EU, the flow of refugees, which were at about 1,500 a day, dropped dramatically to only 10. But no one thanked Turkey for this success.

Even today, when Schulz speaks about the need to stem the tide of migrants who have reached southern Europe, he does not acknowledge that if this situation has not reached disasters proportions for Germany today, it is thanks to Erdoğan and Turkey. Merkel is well aware of this fact but is allowing anti-Turkish sentiment to mushroom and help her win the votes of the far right to consolidate her position in the polls. This is all a great shame.