The Germany of 2024 is no longer the one that welcomed a million Syrian refugees almost a decade ago. The rise of the extreme right has changed the political landscape and now it is a social democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who resoundingly announces that an era of “zero tolerance” is coming with those who “take advantage of the protection” that the country offers. Berlin wants to speed up the deportations of criminals and suspects of radicalism, even if their places of origin are considered unsafe, such as Syria and Afghanistan, Scholz declared this Thursday.
The Mannheim attacker comes from Afghanistan, a 25-year-old man, married with two children, who has been living in Germany for a decade. Last Friday, without saying a word, he pounced on several members of a far-right, anti-Islam organization called Pax Europa and attacked them with a knife. He also stabbed a police officer, Rouven L., 29, who died two days later. This crime has shocked the country and increased pressure on the coalition government to accelerate deportations.
It is no coincidence that the announcement, which Scholz presented this Thursday in the Bundestag with much harsher words than usual, arrives just a few days before the European elections. The polls place the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in second or third place in voting intention – depending on the polls – after having dedicated its entire campaign to describing a Germany overwhelmed by immigration and fueled by Islamist violence.
The debate on immigration has settled into the final stretch of the campaign and overshadows practically all other issues. A year ago, the Länder had asked the Ministry of the Interior to speed up deportations so that people whose asylum application is rejected cannot remain in Germany. The Scholz Government responded with a law, approved last January, which in theory makes it easier to send immigrants in an irregular situation back to their countries, but which in practice has had little impact. The Mannheim crime has given it renewed impetus.
“These criminals must be deported, even if they come from Syria and Afghanistan,” Scholz said in the Bundestag, confirming the words of his Interior Minister, also a social democrat Nancy Faeser, who said that they were going to “study it.” Faeser’s task will now be to translate that mandate into practice, for example by establishing agreements with neighboring nations of those two countries. It will not be easy, because Germany cut relations with Afghanistan in 2021, after the Taliban came to power. No deportations have occurred since then.
Exceptions to the Geneva Convention
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Until now, the law prohibits deportations to war zones. If those affected are threatened with torture, death or other types of mistreatment in their country of origin, they cannot be returned there, something that is stated in both the German Constitution and the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees. Germany wants to pave the way for exceptions.
“In these cases,” the chancellor said in reference to immigrants who commit crimes, “the security of Germany outweighs the interest of the perpetrators in remaining in the country.” “Anyone who takes advantage of our protection, like the Mannheim attacker, will lose it. There will be zero tolerance,” he assured with unusual forcefulness.
These are not only people who have already committed a crime – which would not have prevented the Mannheim crime, since the attacker had no criminal record – but also extremists. “Whoever glorifies terrorism goes against all our values and should also be deported,” Scholz said. Faeser is already looking for “legally and practically feasible ways” to tighten expulsion laws, he added.
The chancellor also responded to a request that opposition politicians have been raising for some time: the creation of “knife-free zones”, such as on trains – in German stations travelers do not pass security checks, unlike in Spain – or in city centers, in order to avoid these types of acts that are so easy to perpetrate. These types of zones will be created “throughout the country,” he advanced in his appearance.
Some German cities already have these knife prohibition zones. In Hamburg they have been in force in two central points since 2007. If the Police detect someone with a knife during their checks, they can impose high fines, up to 10,000 euros, for example in Düsseldorf and Cologne. Mannheim’s market square, where the attack occurred, has also been a prohibited area for months, but it is limited to the afternoon and evening on weekends. The attack occurred at noon.
In the absence of such detailed national statistics, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous in the country, the number of crimes in which a knife or other type of knife was used increased by 50% last year according to police data cited by Der Spiegel. One in three suspects involved in the crimes was under 21 years old, 87% were men and almost half (47%) did not have a German passport.
For the leader of the opposition, the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, will is power, or so it should be. The president of the CDU criticized Scholz for the fact that his government has established contacts at a technical level with Afghanistan to transfer 400 million in development aid and does not use them to implement the expulsions. “Why can’t those contacts be used to deport criminals?” he insisted.
The far-right AfD group accused Scholz of inaction. “The agent would be alive if you had deported the aggressor,” the party co-president, Alice Weidel, snapped at the chancellor. The asylum request of the man, who was shot dead by another police officer and remains hospitalized and unable to testify, was rejected years ago. “The borders must be closed,” added Weidel, who continued to accuse the coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals of “unprotecting citizens.”
The chancellor also had words for AfD, which in the latest Insa survey for the newspaper Bild It obtains 16% of the voting intention in the European elections, only behind the 31% of the Christian Democrats of the CDU. The citizens, he said, addressing the members of the ultra party who were watching him from the chamber, “will take note” of his closeness to Russia and Vladimir Putin. “It’s embarrassing that you received such high praise from the Russian president,” he told them.
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