By Rachel More and Matthias Williams
BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany’s main opposition leader vowed on Thursday to impose immediate border controls if he becomes chancellor, as expected, after elections next month, a day after an Afghan asylum seeker was arrested for a deadly knife attack targeting children.
Friedrich Merz, whose plan would need buy-in from coalition partners after the Feb. 23 vote his party is set to win with a minority, said the attack, which killed a two-year-old boy and an adult passerby, could not become the new normal.
All “illegal immigrants” should be turned away at the border, including those seeking protection, he said.
“We are faced with the ruins of a ten-year-long misguided asylum and immigration policy in Germany,” he told reporters, criticising European Union migration rules as “dysfunctional”.
Merz called for a departure from the EU’s Schengen principle of free movement within the bloc, vowing to order permanent controls at all German borders on day one of his chancellorship if he is elected.
“There will be a de facto ban on entry into the Federal Republic of Germany for all those who do not have valid entry documents,” Merz said.
Wednesday’s stabbings add to a string of violent attacks in Germany that have boosted concerns over migration and fuelled support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which opinion polls put in second place behind Merz’s conservatives.
If implemented, Merz’s policies could roil European politics, where concerns over migration have repeatedly tested the EU’s model of freedom of movement.
The suspect, a 28-year-old Afghan national with a history of violent behaviour who had been undergoing psychiatric treatment, was due to appear before a judge on Thursday afternoon. The judge will decide on his pre-trial detention.
The suspect had had his asylum process closed and said he would voluntarily leave Germany in December, but had not left and remained under treatment, Bavaria’s interior minister said.
A two-year-old boy of Moroccan descent and a 41-year-old man who tried to intervene in the attack, which occurred in a park in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg on Wednesday, died of their injuries. Three other people were injured.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats (SPD) are trailing in polls, convened an emergency meeting with his Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and security authorities late on Wednesday, branding the attack an “unbelievable act of terror”.
“I am sick and tired of seeing such acts of violence occurring here every few weeks. By perpetrators who have actually come to us to find protection here,” Scholz said in a statement.
“A false sense of tolerance is completely inappropriate. The authorities must work flat out to find out why the attacker was still in Germany in the first place. Consequences must follow immediately from the findings – it is not enough to talk.”
Merz said the EU’s Dublin rules, under which someone’s asylum application should be processed in their first country of arrival, had also failed, pointing to the fact that the suspected attacker had come to Germany via Bulgaria.
The conservative leader called for an expansion of migrant detention centres, saying individuals caught by police who had already been asked to leave “must be taken into custody … and deported as quickly as possible.”
A Merz government would make facilities for this available as soon as possible, such as empty barracks, other buildings or converted shipping containers, he said.
Faeser defended her record on deporting people to Afghanistan and said the Dublin system was no longer functioning. But she criticised the conservative-run Bavarian authorities after the attack and questioned whether Merz’s proposals complied with EU law, while also warning the CDU leader not to make political capital out of the attack.
‘POLITICAL ANSWERS’
Some Germans blame the CDU, and in particular Merz’s predecessor and longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, for encouraging the large-scale influx of asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, in 2015.
AfD leader Tino Chrupalla, whose party has won the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk and who was the only German party leader to attend U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, demanded a change in asylum policy.
The AfD and the liberal Free Democrats also demanded closer contacts with the Afghan Taliban, following Austria’s lead, to facilitate removing failed asylum seekers.
Refugees are more likely to be involved in violent crime than the overall German population, said Christian Walburg, a criminology professor at Muenster University.
But this is in part because refugees tend to be young and male – both risk factors – and also more likely than the general population to be burdened with memories of war, violence and difficult childhoods, he said.
(Reporting by Rachel More, Matthias Williams, Andreas Rinke, Thomas Escritt, Alexander Ratz, Jörn Poltz; Writing by Rachel More and Matthias WilliamsEditing by Gareth Jones and Philippa Fletcher)
