After brutal attack by Afghan migrant, Chancellor promises deportation of criminals

BERLIN – Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced on Thursday that Germany would resume deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria after a police officer was killed and four other people injured in a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant last week.

The brutal attack in Mannheim, which was captured on video and quickly spread on the Internet, shocked the country.

Scholz gave a speech on security to Parliament on Thursday, just days before the European elections in which far-right populists across the continent are expected to achieve great success.

“It outrages me when someone who has sought protection here commits the most serious crimes. Such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria and Afghanistan,” said the Chancellor to the applause of the MPs.

The 25-year-old attacker, who killed a 29-year-old police officer who tried to stop him, came to Germany as an asylum seeker in 2014.

“Serious criminals and terrorist threats have no place here,” Scholz added. “In such cases, Germany’s security interests outweigh the interests of the perpetrator.”

Migration was one of the central issues in the European election campaign, exploited by both far-right and mainstream parties to win votes from Europeans who felt dissatisfied with the millions of new arrivals seeking refuge from wars, hunger and climate change, or simply trying to build a better future for themselves.

Referring to Friday’s knife attack, Scholz said: “What happened in Mannheim – the fatal knife attack on a young police officer – is an expression of the misanthropic ideology of radical Islamism. There is only one word for it: terror. Let us declare war on terror.”

Germany is currently not carrying out any deportations to Afghanistan or Syria. The German government does not maintain diplomatic relations with the Taliban in Kabul and considers the security situation in Syria to be too fragile to allow deportations there.

However, the Chancellor said in his speech that his government was already working on solutions to enable the deportation of convicted Afghans to Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries. In Germany, there is discussion about allowing deportations to Syria again.

Scholz also promised that deportation rules would also be tightened for all others who commit or support terrorism.

It is unclear how quickly, if at all, the German government will be able to carry out further deportations of criminal foreigners, as the country’s cumbersome bureaucracy often slows down any political decision.

“The time for warnings and condemnations, denials and announcements is over,” said the opposition leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz. “People expect us to act. They expect decisions.”

Britta Hasselmann, parliamentary group leader of the Greens in Scholz’s governing coalition, questioned the feasibility of the Chancellor’s deportation plans.

She said it would be difficult to negotiate a deportation agreement with the Taliban or Afghanistan’s neighboring countries.

“It must (…) be examined which third countries would be attractive for accepting terrorists or serious criminals. I am curious to see what answers we will find to this,” she said.

When more than a million people from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq came to Germany in 2015 and 2016 after wars and instability in their home countries, many Germans were initially open to the migrants. In recent years, however, the mood has changed.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has successfully exploited some Germans’ concerns about the new arrivals. But in recent months, millions of Germans have taken to the streets to protest against the far-right’s radical plans to deport millions of immigrants, even those with German passports, if they come to power.

A series of scandals surrounding the party’s top candidates in the European elections, pointing to their alleged proximity to Russia and China, as well as the repeated use of Nazi slogans by one of its top politicians, have led to the party’s collapse in recent polls.

Scholz and his Social Democrats, as well as other established parties, are trying to portray themselves as tough opponents on the migration and Islam issues, in the hope that voters will not turn to the AfD to solve migration issues.