The attack in Solingen has shocked Germany, which has not suffered such a serious Islamist attack since the one that left 12 dead at a Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016. On Friday night, a man indiscriminately attacked people attending one of the concerts that the city had organised to celebrate the 650th anniversary of its foundation. He killed three people and seriously injured five others. The fact that the confessed perpetrator is a 26-year-old Syrian refugee has revived the debate on security and migration policy at an extremely sensitive time: this Sunday, key regional elections are being held in which the far right is the favourite.
After the initial shock, the search for explanations and consequences begins. The debate revolves around migration as a risk to the country’s security and is mixed with the impression that this atmosphere could give wings to Alternative for Germany (AfD), a xenophobic party that has made anti-immigration slogans the axis of its campaign. The party has tried to take advantage of the attack even before any information about the attacker was known. “Höcke or Solingen” is the slogan that AfD is waving, in reference to Björn Höcke, the party leader in Thuringia and representative of the most radical wing who, a few hours after the attack, when nothing was yet known about the attacker, called on people to vote for his party: “Free yourselves, put an end to the aberration of forced multiculturalism once and for all!”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed on Monday in Solingen to step up deportations and reduce the number of illegal arrivals. “We will do everything possible to ensure that those who cannot stay in Germany are repatriated,” he said with a serious expression in this town of 160,000 inhabitants in the west of the country, where he paid tribute to the victims. “I feel anger, my anger is directed against the Islamists. They must know that we will not stop their persecution,” said the social democrat politician after placing a white rose next to the bouquets of flowers and candles that the inhabitants of Solingen have been accumulating near the square where the stabbing took place.
The far-right AfD focuses its discourse on the failures of immigration policy and directly links refugees to violence. It has blamed the other parties for the attack and claims to be the only party that “will do something” to prevent cases like the failed deportation of the alleged murderer. According to the polls ―all prior to the attack in Solingen― the party is the favourite or tied with the second force (the conservative CDU) in the three federal states that hold elections in September (Thuringia and Saxony, on the 1st; Brandenburg, on the 22nd). The victory of the party, monitored by the secret services for its extremism, would generate a political earthquake of unknown consequences. AfD has won mayoralties and small rural districts, but has never managed to be the most voted force in one of the 16 countriesGermans.
Experts are trying to answer the question of whether Solingen can give the AfD, which is currently polling at around 30 percent, a boost and increase its lead. “There is a danger of this,” said Matthias Quent, a sociologist specialising in right-wing extremists at public television on Monday. “The AfD reached a high of 35-36 percent in the autumn-winter of last year, which was reversed after the wave of democratic protests at the beginning of the year,” he said.
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In January, Germans took to the streets in large numbers to express their disgust at the AfD meeting with neo-Nazis where a plan to expel millions of foreigners was discussed. The attack in Solingen could bring back this support: “This uncertainty, but also the unrest, can of course have an impact on the outcome of the election,” Quent said.
Criticism of the Government
The alleged killer should not even have been in Germany. Issa al H. arrived in December 2022 after entering the European Union via Bulgaria. He was supposed to have left the country last year, when the authorities issued a deportation order against him. It could not be carried out because they did not find him when they went to look for him at the refugee shelter where he was living. How could this happen?, all the media are asking on Monday while the opposition describes the migration policy of the Scholz government as “failed”.
What happened to Issa al H. has been very common in Germany in recent years. Deportations are announced in advance to those affected, who in many cases simply leave their homes to avoid them. Two out of three deportation attempts fail, according to data from the German Ministry of the Interior, which announced a legal reform months ago to give the police more powers, such as searching other rooms in reception centres or showing up without warning to prevent those affected from fleeing.
“We have to start deporting on a large scale,” Scholz announced on the cover of a magazine in October last year, when German municipalities began to reckon with the impossibility of taking in more refugees. The number of illegal arrivals continued to grow, adding to the pressure on public services caused by the million-odd people who fled the war in Ukraine and settled in Germany. The government also announced its intention to deport to Syria and Afghanistan, countries considered unsafe, after an Afghan man stabbed a policeman to death in Mannheim last June.
In practice, implementing such mass deportations or sending refugees to Syria and Afghanistan has proven to be very complicated. For a start, Berlin has no diplomatic relations with either the Taliban in Kabul or the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Foreign Ministry has been negotiating with other capitals for months to expel Afghans to third countries, but such a solution, if it is achieved, will take time.
The leader of the conservative opposition, Friedrich Merz, has harshly criticised the coalition for spending weeks debating how to prevent the presence of knives on the streets. The increase in knife attacks in recent months had led the Minister of the Interior, the Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, to announce a tough measure and a ban, among other things, on carrying knives with a blade longer than six centimetres (currently the limit is 12).
“The problem is not the knives, but the people who carry them around,” said the CDU chairman. “In most cases, these are refugees, and most of the crimes are motivated by Islamism.” Merz called for no more refugees from Syria and Afghanistan to be accepted and for the mass deportation of those already in Germany who have no right to remain in the country to begin.
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