Politics: shaping the future?

By Richard North - August 26, 2024

There can now be no question that the Solingen killings are being treated as a suspected terrorist attack, with the news even spreading to the Washington Post that the
German federal prosecutors have taken over the case.

With Bild showing the suspected terrorist being transferred by helicopter (none too gently) to the prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, we also have a (partial) name for the man, a 26-year-old Syrian who is being called Issa al H (in accordance with German privacy laws).

As it turns out though, this man is not an asylum seeker. He is a failed asylum seeker, who had been subject to a deportation order which had never been executed.

According to Spiegel, Al H. was born in the Syrian city of Deir al-Sor in January 1998 and is a Sunni Muslim. At the end of 2022, he entered Germany and applied for asylum in Bielefeld.

It was then ruled that he had no grounds for asylum and, in accordance with the EU’s Dublin Regulations, therefore, he has to be returned to Bulgaria, as the country of entry to the EU.

The German authorities, it appears, submitted a transfer request, the Bulgarians agreed, and the Syrian was to be transferred there for “further processing”. But the attempt to deport him failed in June 2023, when he disappeared from his refugee accommodation in Paderborn.

“Why this had largely no consequences for him remains unclear”, says Spiegel, but this post explains that the deportation order expired, whence Ali H re-emerged, only to be allocated to the asylum-seeker shelter in Solingen, from where he mounted his murderous rampage.

It is germane to note that such details are of no interest to the BBC which, at the time of writing had not updated its story for 14 hours, relegating the report to the “other news” section of its website.

The only detail the broadcaster will allow us to know, in this respect, is that Ali H is a Syrian national (his religion is not specified), and that “he arrived in the country (Germany) in December 2022, after leaving war-torn Syria”.

Without really explaining why, therefore, the BBC suggests that “the attack may fuel an already fraught debate about immigration and asylum in Germany”, noting also that there are key regional elections in the country’s east next week, where, it says, the dreaded “far right” is eyeing gains.

The deportation order, however, doesn’t escape the attention of the Telegraph which then goes on to cite Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat opposition leader, responding to the attack.

Merz is insistent that asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan should no longer be accepted in Germany. “It’s not the knives that are the problem”, he says, “but the people who walk around with them”.

“In the majority of cases”, Merz adds, “these are refugees, and in the majority of the crimes there are Islamist motives behind them”, in what is termed “a decisive break with his predecessor Angela Merkel” who, in 2015 admitted over a million refugees, with an open-door policy for Syrians.

Predictably, the Guardian – commenting in 2020 – thought this “gamble” a great success, claiming that “the spectre of jihadist terrorism, which some feared the refugee crisis would usher into the heart of central Europe, has faded from view in recent years”.

Four years later, in late May, a police officer was killed and five others injured by an Afghan national in an attack on an anti-Islam protest in Mannheim. This has triggered a debate on restrictions on immigration and asylum law as well as a ban on carrying knives.

Nancy Faeser, the interior minister, has promised legislation “soon”, with Deutsche Welle telling us that police statistics recorded a 9.7 percent year-on-year rise in cases of serious bodily harm involving a knife, with 8,951 incidents in 2023.

The federal police, which is responsible for safety at Germany’s airports and major railway stations, also reported a significant increase in knife attacks in and around stations, with 430 in the first six months of this year.

Despite reservations on the accuracy of these data, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is using the numbers to suggest that the country’s “migration policy” was to blame. In July, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told public broadcaster ZDF: “We have exploding foreign crime, youth crime, migrant violence, because we have open borders”.

Partly in response, the German government had opened up discussions with the Taliban in order to be able to deport rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan. Mertz, meanwhile, is adamant: “Deportations can be made to Syria and Afghanistan, but we will not accept any more refugees from these countries”, he says.

The Guardian, in its latest report on the developments in Solingen, also acknowledges that the attack is “already stirring debate about Germany’s asylum policy”.

Without so much as a blush, it tells us that Germany’s federal criminal police office has said there have been about a dozen Islamist-motivated attacks since 2000. One of the biggest was in 2016, when a Tunisian man drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens.

The paper also notes the timing of regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia, which take place on 1 September. The “far-right”, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland, it says, “is expected to do well”.

This is a point picked up by The Times, which has published a lengthy piece on the elections. This is headed: “The key German state that could push AfD firebrand to victory”, while the sub-heading declares: “The far-right party is on the brink of winning a state election in Thuringia, with its leader using the Solingen attack to stoke fear of migrants”.

It strikes me that no-one needs to use the Solingen attack to stoke fear of migrants. The facts speak for themselves, coming as they do on the back of a recorded uptick in violence.

Nor is this confined to terrorist attacks. There has been a significant increase in organised crime, particularly focused on drug-crime, much of it involving migrant gangs.

Nevertheless, as The Times records, Björn Höcke – the former history teacher, described as “a consummately demagogic figurehead of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party”, is able to capitalise on the increasing public unease, telling crowds that Germany is sliding into a dictatorship and its people are in existential danger.

Exploiting all the “dog-whistle” issues, Höcke argues that a corrupt state is foisting violent immigrants, multiculturalism, vaccines, gender diversity and the “hypersexualisation” of children on its helpless subjects. He adds that Bill Gates and a cabal of other “globalists” are orchestrating war in Ukraine, busily destroying Germany and other nation states with the aim of subjugating their peoples under a single world government.

In Thuringia, where Höcke and his regional branch of the party are officially classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as “proven right-wing extremists”, the AfD has built its biggest lead. Ahead of the state parliament election, the latest poll put the party on 30 percent of the vote, nine points ahead of its nearest rival.

There is almost no chance, The Times says, “that Höcke will form a state government”. The other parties regard him and the AfD as so toxic that they will form virtually any alliance that keeps him out of power. But it would nonetheless be as shattering a result for the German political mainstream as anything it has experienced in the past three decades.

But, it appears, the Solingen killings will add to the sense of crisis that Höcke has been painting for a decade. Not ill-disposed to using Nazi slogans – for which last month he was fined nearly €17,000 – his anti-foreigner rhetoric may be set to outflank the established parties.

As the Thuringia results come in next week, one can only wonder what might have happened in the UK if the Southport attack had happened in the general election week, and Farage’s Reform party was not so afraid of the “far right” label and was able to take the immigration issue head on.

Then, Farage is no Höcke, and is never likely to come close to matching his rhetoric. But it will be interesting to see whether Solingen is the electoral turning point that Southport could not be, and whether the AfD heralds the political future in Europe.