Fatal knife attack puts immigration top of German political agenda

A fatal knife attack in the west German city of Solingen has placed immigration and Islamist terrorism at the top of the political agenda ahead of elections next Sunday that were already expected to deliver strong gains for the far right.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party, which is polling strongly in the two states of Saxony and Thuringia ahead of elections there on September 1, has turned the incident on Friday into a pillar of its campaign.

Speaking a day after a Syrian immigrant was arrested in Solingen on suspicion of stabbing three people to death and injuring eight others, Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, said the attack showed multiculturalism had failed.

“Is that your ‘diversity’? When people are cut into pieces with machetes or horrifically slaughtered like animals, like they were in Solingen?” Höcke, who was recently fined €17,000 for using Nazi slogans in a speech, told an AfD rally in the small eastern town of Bad Frankenhausen on Sunday.

“This multicultural experiment on our country will lead to the collapse of law and order, the plundering of our welfare system and the loss of our identity,” he told the crowd.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday travelled to Solingen, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, to place a white rose at the scene of Friday’s attack, which has shone a light on the threat posed by Islamist terror as well as his government’s perceived failure to get to grips with illegal immigration.

The suspect was a Syrian refugee who was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria last year, but was able to remain in Germany.

Scholz promised to tighten Germany’s laws on weapons, especially knives, reduce the inflow of irregular migrants and increase deportations. Already, he said, expulsions were up 30 per cent this year, and by two-thirds since 2021. But that was no reason “to rest on our laurels”.

Scholz also promised to deal robustly with Islamist terrorism. “We will not allow our social cohesion to be destroyed by wicked criminals who pursue the most evil intentions,” he said.

But others, even within the chancellor’s party, cautioned against a knee-jerk response — especially any attempt to restrict the right to asylum enshrined in the German constitution.

“We can’t react to this by slamming the door in the faces of people who are often themselves fleeing from Islamists,” said Kevin Kühnert, general secretary of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD).

Even before the Solingen attack, the AfD was cruising to victory in the eastern elections, with polls putting it on 32 per cent in Saxony and 30 per cent in Thuringia, ahead of the three parties in Scholz’s coalition — the SPD, Greens and liberals — as well as Germany’s main opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The AfD has seized on the knife attack to hammer home its anti-foreigner message.

The criticism is focused on the recent history of the alleged assailant, identified by the authorities only as Issa Al H, a 26-year-old Syrian. He entered Germany in 2022 and applied for asylum, a request that was rejected. Last year authorities planned to deport him to Bulgaria, the country via which he had entered the EU. But he went into hiding and the expulsion never took place.

Issa Al H was remanded in custody on Sunday after handing himself in to police. He is accused of murder and belonging to the terror group Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the incident.

Authorities are describing it as the worst Islamist attack in Germany since 2016, when a Tunisian refugee drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring 64.

The Solingen atrocity is a dilemma for Scholz. In June he said Syrian and Afghan asylum seekers who commit serious crimes would now be deported to their home countries, a shift that came after a policeman was killed by a suspected Islamist extremist in the west German city of Mannheim.

But opposition politicians say there is little evidence the tough new line is being implemented. Right-leaning media outlets such as Bild Zeitung, a popular newspaper, routinely carry stories about Syrians with long criminal records who remain at large in Germany.

Experts say the issue could turn into a serious vulnerability for Scholz ahead of Bundestag elections next year when he will seek a second term as chancellor.

Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, said it was time for a fundamental rethink of immigration policy.

The government’s plan to toughen up knife laws was misguided since it was now clear that “it’s not knives that are the problem but the people running around with them”, Merz wrote in an email to supporters on Sunday.

He claimed that in the majority of cases the attackers were refugees, a claim disputed by criminologists, who say most incidents of knife crime involve German nationals.

Merz said Scholz must immediately stop taking in refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and create permanent controls on Germany’s borders.

Scholz’s SPD rejected his demands, however. A refusal to take in migrants from Syria and Afghanistan was “incompatible with our laws, with the European convention on refugees, with our constitution,” said Saskia Esken, SPD co-leader.

The AfD, too, has criticised Merz, saying it was under the CDU chancellor Angela Merkel that Germany let in more than 1mn refugees from the Middle East and north Africa during the migrant crisis of 2015-16.

Höcke, the AfD Thuringia leader, claimed the debate on immigration vindicated his view that it was destroying the fabric of German society.

Höcke himself is one of the country’s most controversial politicians. He has denounced the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and advocates “remigration”, the mass repatriation of foreign immigrants.

In Bad Frankenhausen on Sunday he said Scholz’s liberal policies had undermined domestic security and made Germany “unrecognisable”.

“All the old parties have dissolved Germany like a piece of soap in a stream of lukewarm water,” Höcke told the crowd. “It’s the AfD’s mission to finally turn off the tap.”