Germany’s fractious coalition government has announced a hard-fought compromise on changes to weapons laws and asylum rules designed to prevent Islamist attacks such as last Friday’s mass stabbing that left three people dead.
Three days before key state elections in which each of the ruling parties risk heavy losses to the far right, government ministers said the knife rampage allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker at a street festival in the western city of Solingen had exposed critical weaknesses in the country’s immigration and security policy.
“The Solingen attack shook us to our core and we said that we as a government would react to it with tough measures,” said the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, a Social Democrat.
She said the government would ban the carrying of knives at public events including street festivals like the scene of the Solingen attack, and on long-distance public transportation such as trains and buses.
Federal police will be given the power to impose spot checks for weapons including long knives in “heavy crime” areas such as railway stations. Police officers will be able to use stun guns to stop violent suspects.
The measures also call for the swifter deportation of refused asylum seekers and the removal of financial benefits for those who have already been registered in another EU member country, in a policy the mass-market tabloid Bild called “bed, bread, soap”, referring to the bare-minimum provisions that will be accorded.
Rights groups including Pro Asyl criticised the proposal as “unconstitutional” and said “social welfare payments must not be cut as a purported deterrent”.
Faeser said: “No one will go hungry or sleep on the street in Germany.”
The suspect in Solingen who allegedly killed three and injured eight had been due to be returned to Bulgaria last year but was not at his shelter when he was to be picked up.
Asylum seekers will also be barred from taking holidays in their countries of origin. The justice minister, Marco Buschmann, of the centre-right Free Democrats, said this stood in “clear contradiction to the claim their home countries are not safe”.
Only in rare cases would such travel be allowed, “such as a family funeral”, Faeser said. The penalty for violations would be the loss of asylum status.
Security authorities will be granted broader rights to use biometric data including facial recognition found online to better determine the identity of criminal suspects, also using information compiled about asylum seekers.
Buschmann said “tens of thousands” of asylum seekers in Germany could not be sent home or to the EU country where they were registered “simply because they could not be located” at the time of a scheduled deportation.
The government agreed to step up the use of artificial intelligence to fight online Islamist propaganda, which Buschmann said was a prime driver of radicalisation of migrants.
Noting the charged atmosphere around migration and security issues since last week’s attack, Anja Hajduk, a minister in the economy ministry representing the Greens at the news conference, said the coalition wanted to focus on integrating foreign citizens and preventing extremism.
Hajduk said the government’s internal debate had been “guided by the principle that the basic right to asylum in our country must be protected”. She said it was “important to push back against the general suspicion against people due to their background”.
But she said “this horrible attack showed us that it is crucial” to take action to bolster security.
The coalition parties said they would meet the conservative opposition party the Christian Democrats (CDU) and representatives of Germany’s 16 federal states early next week to agree further changes.
The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, who is expected to challenge the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in next September’s general election, accused him of “losing control of his own country” as he demanded a range of tough measures against asylum seekers.
Last week’s attack has piled pressure on Scholz’s often hamstrung government to address some of the country’s thorniest policy challenges before pivotal regional elections in eastern Germany, two of which will be held on Sunday.
In each of the state polls, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which has seized on the Solingen rampage as an example of the government’s failings, is expected to perform well.
A leftist-conservative upstart, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which is also highly critical of Germany’s migration policies, is expected to gain a vote share in the double digits, possibly forcing some mainstream parties below the 5% hurdle needed for representation in state parliament.
