Shock quickly turned to anger in Germany when a Syrian asylum seeker was arrested for the brutal knife attack in the city of Solingen last weekend. Three people were murdered and eight more injured by a man who had no right to be in Germany.

Politicians from the coalition government reacted with a flurry of statements, demanding anything from tougher knife laws to quicker deportations of illegal migrants. But many voters want to see more than tweaks to the immigration system before they can begin to feel safe again on Germany’s streets.

The message to Scholz is clear: if he wants to toughen immigration policy, he’ll have to do it without the Greens

Recognising the tense mood across the country, opposition leader Friedrich Merz has called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a response that amounts to more than ‘hollow rituals’ of grief. ‘Enough… no more taboos,’ the Christian Democrat thundered in a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. Merz demanded nothing less than a U-turn of Germany’s immigration policy. And he has challenged Scholz to work with him to make it happen.

This offer to work with the opposition on the highly sensitive issue of immigration has manoeuvred Scholz into an awkward position. If he doesn’t take Merz up on it, his hands are tied. In recent months, his fragile, three-party coalition has teetered on the brink of collapse. With the pro-immigration Green party as an integral part of his majority, Scholz is unlikely to push through any measures to restrict the number of people coming into the country.

His Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock certainly shows no sign of changing her stance on immigration after Solingen. Campaigning for her party in the eastern German state of Saxony, where there will be regional elections on Sunday, she said, ‘Even if many hatefully talk this down: we can do this.’

The words would have been familiar to her listeners. They allude to Angela Merkel’s famous ‘We can do this’ slogan with which she attempted to rally support for her border policy in 2015 when she allowed over one million........

© The Spectator