AfD could benefit from knife attack in Solingen

Three people murdered with a knife. Several people seriously injured. At a peaceful city festival dedicated to diversity. The suspected perpetrator: a Syrian man who was supposed to be deported but escaped.

What happened in Solingen is exactly the scenario that the AfD has been conjuring up for years. Just as the Mannheim knife attack helped the party in the European elections in the spring, the latest terrorist attack could now benefit the party in the upcoming state elections.

The crisis as a gift for the AfD

The AfD has been successfully focusing on the issue of migration for almost a decade. The extreme core of its ideology is the conspiracy theory of a deliberate escalation of immigration in order to wipe out the cultural identity of the Germans. AfD politicians speak of “foreign infiltration” or “ethnic replacement” – or, like the Thuringian state leader Björn Höcke, of “national death through population exchange”. The scandalization of “mass rapes”, “knifemen” and “fear spaces” is an integral part of the party’s propaganda.

The warning about bloodthirsty foreigners also fits perfectly into the AfD’s overall narrative of economically and socially damaging migration. “Burkas, girls in headscarves and supported knifemen and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and, above all, the welfare state,” declared federal leader Alice Weidel in the Bundestag in 2018.

The demagogy works. With every increase in immigration and every attack, the AfD’s support grows and its base broadens. In the so-called refugee autumn of 2015, which catapulted the AfD from an existential low in the polls, the later party leader Alexander Gauland said: “You could call this crisis for us. It was very helpful.”

From this cynical perspective, the attack in Solingen could also be a gift for the AfD. The timing of the attack is particularly good. In less than a week, the state parliaments in Saxony and Thuringia will be elected – and the debate about the consequences will continue at least until then.

The AfD already has a chance of coming first in all three states. Especially in Thuringia, where the party landscape is particularly fragmented, the party seems unlikely to win.

In addition, with the 30 percent predicted for it, the AfD could succeed in gaining the so-called blocking minority in both parliaments. If it were to gain more than a third of the seats, it could block constitutional changes or judicial elections – or would have to be included by the other factions.

The blocking minority as a powerful lever

On September 1st, it will depend on just a few thousand votes whether the AfD will be able to gain this powerful leverage and whether it will even be able to form a majority in Thuringia. Or to put it another way: Solingen could decide the election.

This is all the more true since the issues of violence and migration dominated public discourse even before the recent murders. According to a recent survey by Forsa on behalf of RTL and the star For 68 percent of Saxons, “crime and violence in society” is the greatest concern. 60 percent said the “immigration of refugees and evacuees” was a problem, and among AfD voters the figure was as high as 90 percent. In Thuringia, the answers were similar.

The AfD is now even more determined to use the Solingen murders for its election campaign. On the evening of the attack, Höcke appealed to “Germans, Thuringians” to free themselves and end the “misguided path of forced multiculturalism”. He concluded the post on X with the sentence: “Vote for change on September 1st”.

This is also why the Union is frantically trying to make the issue more prominent. CSU leader Markus Söder called for faster deportations, and CDU leader Friedrich Merz wrote in an email to party members. The key sentence: “Deportations to Syria and Afghanistan are possible, but we will not accept any more refugees from these countries.”

At the end of July, Thuringian CDU top candidate Mario Voigt set the direction. “We can no longer accept everyone from Syria as before,” the state party leader told the star“And we have to deport them back to Syria.”

The Union has been warned. After all, the European election campaign showed how an Islamist attack helped the AfD mobilize in the hot phase. The party was having a bad run because of the scandals surrounding its top candidates and the new competition from the Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) alliance, until ten days before the election date, when a man stabbed several people in Mannheim. A police officer died.

From 14 percent to almost 16 percent

Here too, the suspected perpetrator was a refugee. And here too, the Afghan-born man’s asylum application was rejected – something the AfD denounced on all channels. At the same time, its federal vice president Stephan Brandner indignantly denied that it was an election campaign. That is also part of the strategy.

In the end, the AfD, which had been at 14 percent in most polls at the end of May, received just under 16 percent in the election on June 9 – and thus the psychologically important second place behind the CDU and CSU. In eastern Germany, it was ahead across the board.

Election researcher Andrea Römmele was not the only one to see a connection between Mannheim and the election result. “Those who do not have a clear party preference are particularly vulnerable, of course.”

Number of knife attacks increases

However, the AfD is also able to exploit the issue because it can draw on facts. A good third of all crimes in Germany last year were linked to foreign suspects. The typical immigration law violations have already been factored out, while the proportion of foreigners is only around 15 percent. The number of knife attacks rose last year by almost ten percent to almost 9,000.

Even the SPD and FDP, the traffic light parties, are demanding that immigration be limited and controlled and that criminal foreigners be deported. And across all political borders, there is agreement that Islamist terror must be consistently combated.

Solingen as a symbol of state powerlessness

But so far it has remained mainly just announcements. Deportations have increased by 30 percent, but at a low level, and the majority of returns continue to fail. The knife ban planned by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is also of little use when a kitchen knife from a refugee home is enough to take the lives of three people.

Regardless of the fact that there are no easy solutions to this problem, the murders at the city festival in North Rhine-Westphalia seem like a symbol of state impotence. After the attack in Mannheim, he pointed out that experience shows that the uncertainty after attacks leads to the respective government being punished.

If the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia were to achieve even higher results than the figures recently predicted, at least one explanation would be easy to find. It is: Solingen.