Scholz's challenger vows tough border rules as attack puts migration in German election spotlight

BERLIN — 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 others wounded 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 before Germany's Feb. 23 election, met with the heads of the country's security services Wednesday evening and said they will ''draw the necessary consequences. Now.''

On Thursday, he pointed the finger back at opposition-run Bavaria, declaring that there were ''shortcomings'' in the state's enforcement of rules that his federal government has tightened. Scholz said it will ''continue the course'' of reducing irregular migration and increasing deportations.

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 that Germany has had a ''misguided asylum and immigration policy'' for a decade — 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.

Merz added that people who are supposed to leave the country must no longer be let go if they are picked up by police, and should be taken into custody and deported as quickly as possible, helped by an increase in detention capacity.

Merz, who may well have to form a coalition with center-left parties to become chancellor, insisted that ''compromises are no longer possible on these issues.''

The outgoing government already instituted temporary controls on all of Germany's borders. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the government has ''massively tightened laws,'' for instance to ease deportations, and pointed to a yet-to-be-implemented agreement on revamped EU migration rules.

Faeser questioned whether Merz's vow to bar all irregular entry is possible under EU law — ''I would say no.'' She said that ''one shouldn't use such a serious crime for electioneering,'' and added: ''What is he promising people? If this is not fulfilled, that also destroys trust.''

The Aschaffenburg attack followed knife attacks in Mannheim and in Solingen last year in which the suspects were immigrants from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively — in the latter case, also a rejected asylum-seeker who was supposed to have been sent to Bulgaria. In last month's Christmas market car ramming attack in Magdeburg, the suspect is a Saudi doctor who had come to various regional authorities' attention in the past.

Mainstream parties are feeling pressure from the strong poll ratings of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, with which all say they won't work after the election. Discontent about migration is a mainstay of its support, which recent surveys show at about 20%, putting it in second place.

Alice Weidel, the AfD's candidate for chancellor, posted on X that the outgoing parliament should vote next week on closing Germany's borders and turning back irregular migrants.

Faeser said that ''we have reduced irregular migration strongly.'' Authorities say 229,751 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, a 30% decrease from the previous year. There were 18,384 deportations in the year's first 11 months, compared with 16,430 in all of 2023.

Opposition politicians complained Thursday that there have been no further deportations to Afghanistan since a first flight in August. Faeser said that ''we are working intensively on deporting more criminals to Afghanistan.''