The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has promised tougher weapons laws and swifter enforcement of deportation rules in response to the deadly mass stabbing in the western city of Solingen, as the far right seized on public outrage in the run-up to key state elections.
Scholz laid a single white rose at the scene of Friday night’s rampage claimed by the Islamic State group in which a Syrian asylum seeker is alleged to have killed three and injured eight people attending a street festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary.
After meeting with regional officials and listening to what he called the “very moving accounts” of emergency services workers who tended to the victims, Scholz told reporters he was “furious” about the murders but would not let them tear apart German society.
“This was terrorism – terrorism against us all, threatening all our lives, our coexistence, our way of life,” Scholz, a Social Democrat, told reporters. “That is also what the people who plan and carry out such attacks always intend and it is something we will never accept.”
Scholz, whose unpopular government has faced fierce criticism on migration policy and crime from the conservative opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party before next month’s three regional elections, said his centre-left-led coalition was prepared to “do everything it our power to ensure such things never happen again”.
This would include reforming weapons laws and studying how asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected can be sent back more quickly either to their country of origin if deemed safe or the European country where they first applied for refuge, Scholz said.
The suspect identified by federal prosecutors as Issa Al H, 26, whose last name has not been released due to data protection rules, arrived in Germany in late 2022 and applied for asylum, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported. Media reports said he was at that time not known to security authorities as an Islamic extremist.
His application was later rejected and he was slated last year for deportation to Bulgaria, where he had first been registered under European Union rules as an asylum seeker.
The regional interior minister, Herbert Reul, denied media reports that Issa Al H had then “vanished” but said it appeared his stay in Germany had outlasted legal deadlines, meaning he could no longer be sent to another country.
Scholz in early June told parliament he backed the deportation of violent, foreign-born criminals even if they came from war-ravaged Syria or Afghanistan, in a hardline stance announced days before European elections in which the AfD performed well.
The shift in position came after an Afghan asylum seeker allegedly killed a police officer at a far-right rally, and in response to accusations from the right and the far right that his government was lax on deportations.
The Afghan case also prompted the federal interior minister, Nancy Faeser, to call for stricter laws on carrying long blades in public amid a rise in knife violence. However, the proposals were criticised within the government by the liberal Free Democrats, who reportedly have dropped their opposition since the Solingen attack.
Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of the AfD, wrote in a post on X even before the alleged assailant surrendered to police on Saturday: “A knife ban will not help in such situations. Germany needs an immediate about-face in its migration and security policy!”
The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, who is widely expected to be Scholz’s main challenger in the general election in September 2025, called for a “turning point” in Germany’s “naive” migration policy.
He sent a letter to Scholz calling for a total stop to asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan entering Germany. “After the terror attack in Solingen, it should finally be clear: knives are not the problem but rather the people running around with them,” he wrote.
Even before the bloodshed in Solingen, opinion polls indicated that the AfD was likely to emerge as the strongest party in all three states voting in September: Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg.
CDU party leaders said Merz and Scholz would meet later in the week to discuss possible consequences from the Solingen attack.
On Sunday, about 30 members of the youth wing of the AfD rallied in Solingen, met by a counterprotest of a few hundred people defending diversity in the city. Police broke up minor scuffles between the groups.
A sign reading “love instead of hate” lay among the bouquets in memory of the victims on Monday.
Solingen, a city in western Germany near Cologne and Düsseldorf, has a population of 160,000 people, about 19% of whom are not German citizens, many of them the descendants of “guest workers” who arrived in the 1960s and 70s. The city also has a large community of dual citizens.
Speaking at the news conference with Scholz, the North Rhine-Westphalia state premier, Hendrik Wüst, pleaded with the extreme right not to exploit the tragedy, and noted Solingen had bitter experience in recovering from trauma as the site of a horrific neo-Nazi attack in 1993.
Amid a wave of racist violence that shocked the country, far-right assailants set fire to a home occupied by a large Turkish family, killing five people including three children and injuring a further 14 people. The perpetrators were convicted and given long prison sentences.