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Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner in the race to become German chancellor, plans to submit a migration bill to impose “quasi-permanent” border controls following a fatal knife attack in the south of the country.
The leader of the Christian Democratic Union, which is predicted to win general elections on February 23, has also vowed to ban entry to asylum seekers and speed up deportations. His party is planning to put measures to a vote in parliament as soon as next week, he said on Friday.
Existing EU migration rules were “dysfunctional”, the conservative leader said, adding: “Germany must therefore make use of its right to the primacy of national law.”
The planned measures respond to growing public outcry after the killing on Wednesday of a two-year old and an adult by an Afghan asylum seeker in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. Frustration with Berlin’s inability to take a tougher approach on irregular immigration has increased support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The attack in the town 40km south-east of Frankfurt comes a month after a Saudi Arabian doctor ploughed through a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing six and injuring hundreds. In August, a Syrian national fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others in the western city of Solingen. Terror group Isis claimed responsibility for the Solingen attack.
AfD has seized on the attacks to justify its calls for mass deportations of immigrants. The party is predicted to finish second with about 20 per cent of the vote, according to pollsters. On Wednesday, AfD leader Alice Weidel published a letter urging Merz to collaborate in parliament on migration.
Merz was trying to draw a line under the era of former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, who divided her party by allowing 1mn mainly Syrian refugees to enter Germany in 2015, Uwe Jun, a political scientist, said.
“But it is hard to see how any party can benefit from the current immigration debate except for the AfD,” Jun said.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democratic party is trailing in third place in the polls, sought to redirect the blame for the latest attack on to Markus Söder, the conservative president of Bavaria. Söder is leader of the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, and has been campaigning with Merz.
The suspect in Wednesday’s attack, who has been arrested, is a 28-year-old Afghan national whose asylum application was rejected in 2023 and should have been deported back to Bulgaria, where he entered the EU. He had known psychiatric problems and had told authorities he would voluntarily leave Germany a month ago, according to Bavarian authorities.
After the Solingen attack, Scholz’s coalition introduced temporary controls along all its land borders, a move it said “was compatible with European law”.
But Scholz has been criticised for failing to solve the problem. “Blah-Blah Chancellor,” read the front-page headline of Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, on Friday.
“The blame game is on now,” said Henning Meyer, public policy professor at the University of Tübingen. “People rightly feel that the government is not in control, but it’s a systemic administrative problem.”
Meyer added: “The attackers were all known and some identified as potential threats. There is a problem of flow of information between authorities.”
Multiple agencies received warnings about the Magdeburg attacker, a refugee who had expressed support for the AfD and had known psychiatric issues.
Merz’s party could secure a parliamentary majority for his migration proposals with backing from the Liberals, AfD and the party of leftwinger Sahra Wagenknecht and without the support of the SPD and Greens. The two coalition parties may face a backlash if they decided to abstain or reject the measures.
Green MP Konstantin von Notz warned that the proposals were “in conformity with neither the constitution nor European law . . . Merz is following in the footsteps of Donald Trump”.
Merz also risked losing support if the attacks continued, Prof Meyer said.
“Merz wants to make border controls quasi-permanent, but the danger is that he overpromises and doesn’t deliver and there is another attack,” he said. “The illegal immigrants don’t tend to be the ones lining up at the border crossings and Germany has a big green border.”
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