Scholz's challenger demands tougher migration rules as knife attack spills into German election
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Germany's opposition leader vowed Thursday to bar people from entering the country without proper papers and to step up deportations if he is elected chancellor next month, as a knife attack by a rejected asylum-seeker spilled over into an election campaign in which he is the front-runner.
Two people, including a 2-year-old boy, were killed and three injured Wednesday in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg. The suspect, arrested shortly afterward, is a 28-year-old Afghan with a history of psychiatric problems and violence who said over a month ago that he would leave Germany voluntarily.
His asylum application was rejected in 2023 and authorities failed to send him back to Bulgaria, where he first arrived in the European Union, according to Bavarian officials, who pointed the finger at the federal migration office. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose center-left party trails in polls ahead of Germany's Feb. 23 election, met the heads of the country's security services on Wednesday evening and said they will “draw the necessary consequences. Now.” He didn't specify what those would be.
His main election challenger, Friedrich Merz, whose center-right Union bloc leads polls, stepped up his party's vows to toughen migration policy. He said Germany has had a “misguided asylum and immigration policy” for 10 years — since Angela Merkel, a chancellor from his own party and a former Merz rival, allowed large numbers of migrants into the country.
Merz said that if he becomes chancellor, he would order the Interior Ministry on his first day in office to control all of Germany's borders permanently and “turn back all attempts at illegal entry without exception." He argued that EU rules are “recognizably dysfunctional" and Germany must exert a right to the primacy of national law.
