A 24 -year -old Afghan at the wheel of a car has caused 28 injured, including some seriously and several minors, by running over the crowd in Munich. The city police arrested the driver, a asylum seeker who resided in the Bavarian city. The attack, 10 days after the general elections and with immigration and security in the center of debates after similar episodes in recent months, has lit the campaign with requests and promises to harden legislation.
“It is suspected that it is an attack,” said the president of the Free State of Bavaria, the social -Christian Markus Söder (CSU). “Something has to change in Germany, this is a new test. We cannot go attack in attack and show us dismayed. (…) Things really have to change … fast. ” The Bávara prosecutor’s anti -terrorism office assumed the investigation.
Politicians on the moderate right like Söder, or his ally, the candidate for the Friedrich Merz Foreign Ministry, defend, in the campaign for the elections of February 23, a hardening of immigration and asylum laws. They argue that this is the appropriate formula to respond to the concerns of a part of society and stop the increase in the extreme right. The outgoing government of the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz defends itself by promising “maximum hardness” and claims that it has already “massively” reinforced the laws to expel foreign criminals.
“An Afghan perpetrator has seriously injured people and this is something that we cannot tolerate or accept,” said Scholz. “Who commits crimes in Germany will not only be convicted hard and will go to jail, but must assume that he will not be able to prolong his residence in Germany.”
The attack, which is still unknown the motivation, has happened on the eve of the start of the Security Conference, in which several international leaders will be concentrated in the capital of Bavara, taken by strong security measures. And the same day that the four main candidates – the democratian Merz; Foreign Minister Scholz; the leader of the extreme right, Alice Weidel; and environmentalist Robert Habeck – submitted in turn to citizens’ questions in the public chain ZDF.
The program began with a question by a woman from Solingen, a city where last August a sirio asylum plaintiff stabbed the attendees of a concert, and killed three people. The woman said she no longer felt “sure” in her own city. And he asked the Foreign Minister, who opened the interrogation turn, if he did not carry a “moral responsibility” for the repetition of attacks perpetrated by young people with similar profiles and methods. The chancellor insisted that security is a “maximum priority” for him.
The events have occurred at 10.30 during an act convened by Verdi, the main union of the service sector, in the city center. A car, Modi Cooper model, approached the tail of the demonstration, in which a few hundred people participated and where the police were present, and accelerated. According to the face -to -face testimony of a journalist from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitungbased in Munich, the outrage left dozens of injured on the ground. The agents, after shooting to stop the vehicle, immobilized the driver.
According to the publication The mirrorthe author of the attack was born in Kabul in 2001 and arrived in Germany in 2016. His asylum request was rejected, although he received an authorization to continue residing in this country and avoid expulsion. In 2023 they lived in Germany 419,410 Afghan. Interior Minister, Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, regretted: “Again, the alleged author is a young man from Afghanistan.” He promised “the maximum hardness” against the perpetrator, according to statements collected by the German agency DPA. And he claimed that Germany is “the only state in Europe” that expels Afghanistan to people from this country, although it is governed by the Taliban.
The attacks and crimes perpetrated by foreigners have for months the German politics and can be decisive in the elections. On December 20, and left about 200 injured. The aggressor was born in Saudi Arabia and was critical of Islam. On January 22, in the Bavarian municipality of Aschaffenburg, a claimant of Afghan asylum stabbed several people in a park and killed a two -year -old boy and an adult.
In the electoral campaign, the Democristian Union (CDU), allied with the Söder CSU, promotes stricter immigration laws and accuses the social democratic Scholz of inaction to the series of attacks. At the end of January, a motion from the CDU/CSU in the Bundestag to reject the asylum plaintiffs on the German borders were adopted with the votes of the extreme right -wing party Alliance for Germany (AFD). Another proposal of the immigration law was rejected, despite the support of this party. The Democristian Merz is the favorite to be the next chancellor.
The polls place in second position to AFD, a party that will lead the hard hand against immigrants and refugees. “Should always be like that? Migratory turn now! ”, He wrote on the social network X, after the attack, Alice Weidel, the AFD candidate for the Foreign Ministry.
