Merz said the EU’s Dublin rules, under which someone’s asylum application should be processed in their first country of arrival, had also failed, pointing to the fact that the suspected attacker had come to Germany via Bulgaria.
The conservative leader called for an expansion of migrant detention centres, saying individuals caught by police who had already been asked to leave “must be taken into custody … and deported as quickly as possible.”
A Merz government would make facilities for this available as soon as possible, such as empty barracks, other buildings or converted shipping containers, he said.
Faeser defended her record on deporting people to Afghanistan and said the Dublin system was no longer functioning. But she criticised the conservative-run Bavarian authorities after the attack and questioned whether Merz’s proposals complied with EU law, while also warning the CDU leader not to make political capital out of the attack.
“POLITICAL ANSWERS”
Some Germans blame the CDU, and in particular Merz’s predecessor and longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, for encouraging the large-scale influx of asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, in 2015.
AfD leader Tino Chrupalla, whose party has won the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk and who was the only German party leader to attend U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, demanded a change in asylum policy.
The AfD and the liberal Free Democrats also demanded closer contacts with the Afghan Taliban, following Austria’s lead, to facilitate removing failed asylum seekers.
Refugees are more likely to be involved in violent crime than the overall German population, said Christian Walburg, a criminology professor at Muenster University.
But this is in part because refugees tend to be young and male – both risk factors – and also more likely than the general population to be burdened with memories of war, violence and difficult childhoods, he said.
