The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has held a meeting with the country’s opposition leader to discuss how to change immigration policy and increase deportations, after a deadly knife attack on Friday linked to Islamic State.
Described as the “Solingen Summit” by the media, after the attack in the western city of Solingen, in which a Syrian who had applied for asylum in Germany is alleged to have killed three and injured eight people, details of the meeting between Scholz and the leader of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), Friedrich Merz, held in Berlin were not made public. Merz is due to hold a press conference later on Tuesday.
Merz, seen as Scholz’s main challenger in the September 2025 general election, has called for a “turning point” in Germany’s “naive” migration policy.
At an election rally in Dresden on Monday he presented the government with a list of demands, including a halt to asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan being allowed to enter Germany, and said his CDU/CSU alliance were “at the ready” to jointly agree what he called “sensible laws” in the event that Scholz’s Social Democrats were unable to find a sufficient majority for reform in the three-way governing coalition.
The attacks, carried out on Friday night during the 650th anniversary celebrations in Solingen, have been seized upon by the far-right and stoked political strain over asylum and deportation policy ahead of three key state elections in September.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), riding high on an anti-immigration ticket, is top of the polls in the states of Saxony, and Thuringia, where electionstake place on Sunday and in Brandenburg, three weeks later.
Demonstrations sparked by the attacks have taken place in towns and cities in Germany, held by both anti-racist campaigners and far-right protesters. Police said on Tuesday they were investigating after racist slogans and at least one Hitler salute were observed at a far-right rally in Solingen.
On a visit to Solingen on Monday, Scholz promised quicker enforcement of existing deportation rules as well as tougher weapons laws in response to the attack. He said that his centre-left government was prepared to “do everything in our power to ensure such things never happen again”.
This includes working out how asylum seekers whose applications have been turned down can be returned more quickly either to their country of origin – if deemed safe – or to the EU country where they first applied for asylum.
On Tuesday, the general secretary of the CDU, Carsten Linnemann, called on Scholz to recognise that a “paradigm shift” was needed in his government’s migration policy. “The chancellor must see that it can’t continue as it has done,” he said. The attacks in Solingen amounted to a last straw, and “societal cohesion” was at stake, he told broadcaster DLF.
The justice minister, Marco Buschmann, of the pro-business FDP, said he opposed a halt to asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan, saying that a blanket ban on receiving people from certain countries was not in line with German or EU law. Stating the importance of “talking about the numbers and the distribution of refugees who come to Europe”, he told TV station ARD it was not right to say “no one is able to come to us any more”.
Government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said any agreements would have to be “expedient” and could not contravene Germany’s constitution or the UN’s charter of human rights.
Dietmar Woidke, leader of the northern state of Brandenburg, where a state election will be held on 22 September, said in an interview that “feelings of security have dissipated in parts of the population”. He added: “We need fast solutions that can also be legally implemented.”
The interior minister, Nancy Faeser, insisted that sufficient legal structures were already in place following the introduction of new principles according to which deportations could take place, in an interview with the news group Funke Mediengruppe: “But crucial for their success is above all that the new rules are applied properly at a state level,” she said.
