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Friedrich Merz, the front-runner in the race to become German chancellor, plans to introduce a migration bill to impose “quasi-permanent” border controls after a fatal knife attack in the country’s south.
The leader of the Christian Democratic Union, who is tipped to win the February 23 general election, also vowed to ban asylum seekers and speed up deportations. His party plans to put the measures to a vote in parliament as early as next week, he said on Friday.
The EU’s existing migration rules were “dysfunctional”, the conservative leader said, adding: “Germany must therefore exercise its right to the primacy of national law.”
The planned measures respond to growing public outrage after Wednesday’s killing 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 crack down on irregular immigration has increased support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD).
The attack in the town 40 km southeast of Frankfurt comes a month after a Saudi Arabian doctor walked through a Christmas market in the eastern city Magdeburgkilling six and injuring hundreds. In August, a Syrian national fatally killed three people and injured eight others in the western city of Solingen. Terror Group ISIS claimed responsibility for the Solingen attack.
Afd seized on the attacks to justify its calls mass deportations from immigrants. The party is projected to finish second with around 20 percent of the vote, according to polls. On Wednesday, AFD leader Alice Weidel Published a letter in which he asked Merz to cooperate in Parliament on migration.
Merz was trying to draw a line under the era of former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, who split her party by allowing 1m mostly Syrian refugees to enter Germany in 2015, said Uwe Jun, a political scientist.
“But it’s hard to see how any party can benefit from the current immigration debate, apart from the AFD,” Jun said.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democratic Party trailed in third place in the polls, sought to shift the blame for the latest attack onto Markus Söder, Bavaria’s conservative president. Söder is the leader of the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, and is campaigning with Merz.
The suspect in Wednesday’s attack, who was arrested, is a 28-year-old Afghan national whose asylum application was rejected in 2023 and was due to be deported back to Bulgaria, where he entered the EU. He had known psychiatric problems and told authorities he would voluntarily leave Germany a month ago, according to Bavarian authorities.
After the Solingen attack, Scholz’s coalition presented temporary controls For all its land borders, the move he said is “compatible with European law”.
But Scholz has been criticized for not solving the problem. “Chancellor Blah-Blah,” read the front page headline of Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, on Friday.
“The blame game is on now,” said Henning Meyer, a professor of public policy at the University of Tübingen. “People rightly feel that the government is out of control, but this is a systemic administrative problem.”
Meyer added: “The attackers were known and some were identified as potential threats. There is a problem of information flow between authorities.”
Multiple agencies received warnings about the Magdeburg attacker, a refugee who has expressed support for the AFD and is known to have psychiatric issues.
Merz’s party could secure a parliamentary majority for its migration proposals with the support of the liberals, the AfD and Sahr Wagenknecht’s Leftwinger party and without the support of the SPD and the Greens. The two coalition parties may face a backlash if they choose to abstain or reject the measures.
Green MP Konstantin von Notz warned that the proposals “are in line with neither constitutions nor European law. . . Merz is following in the footsteps of Donald Trump”.
Merz also risked losing support if the attacks continued, Prof. Meyer.
“Merz wants to make border controls quasi-permanent, but the danger is that it is overproduced and not delivered, and there is another attack,” he said. “Illegal immigrants don’t tend to be at border crossings, and Germany has a big green border.”
