[Discussion] European Politics Discussion

SOLINGEN, Germany (AP) — A 26-year-old man turned himself into police, saying he was responsible for the Solingen knife attack that left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary, German authorities announced early Sunday.

Duesseldorf police said in a joint statement with the prosecutor’s office that the man “stated that he was responsible for the attack.”

“This person’s involvement in the crime is currently being intensively investigated,” the statement said.

The suspect is a Syrian citizen who had applied for asylum in Germany, police confirmed to The Associated Press.

On Saturday the Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, without providing evidence. The extremist group said on its news site that the attacker targeted Christians and that he carried out the assaults Friday night “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.” The claim couldn’t be independently verified.

The attack comes amid debate over immigration ahead of regional elections next Sunday in Germany’s Saxony and Thueringia regions where anti-immigration parties such as the populist Alternative for Germany are expected to do well. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the country would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four more people injured.

On Saturday, a synagogue in France was targeted in an arson attack. French police said they made an arrest early Sunday.

Friday’s attack plunged the city of Solingen into shock and grief. A city of about 160,000 residents near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, Solingen was holding a “Festival of Diversity” to celebrate its anniversary.

The festival began Friday and was supposed to run through Sunday, with several stages in central streets offering attractions such as live music, cabaret and acrobatics. The attack took place in front of one stage.

Prederick wrote:

Sigh.

Yeah, quite a few ---hats doing their best lately to prove right wing "throw em all out and build a wall" jerks correct. Solingen was just the most headline-grabbing event, but there has been a rash of stabbings by migrants/refugees recently.

Irregular migration into Germany "must go down" after a Syrian man who came to Germany as an asylum seeker was charged with killing three people in an attack in the western town of Solingen last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said.

"This was terrorism, terrorism against us all," Mr Scholz said during a visit to Solingen on Monday.

Mr Scholz also said his government would have to do "everything we can to ensure that those who cannot and should not stay here in Germany are repatriated and deported" and that deportations would be sped up if necessary.

He also promised to tighten laws on weapons ownership "very quickly".

The political ramifications of the tragedy started reverberating across Germany as soon as officials confirmed the suspect in Friday’s deadly stabbings was a Syrian refugee.

The alleged attacker - named as 26-year-old Issa Al H. - is suspected of links to the terror organisation Islamic State.

An already heated debate about migration has become even more ferocious.

A day after the attacks, conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz demanded an end to taking in refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and called for controls on all of Germany’s borders. 



Alice Weidel, leader of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD), has gone a step further and wants a complete stop to all migration.

Experts say such suggestions are not feasible and incompatible with German and European Union law.

Mr Scholz’s governing centre-left SPD party says Germany remains committed to its legal and humanitarian commitments to help those fleeing persecution.

But his government has also pledged to deport migrants who have committed serious crimes and people whose application for asylum has been rejected.

The suspect in the Solingen attack came to Germany in 2022 as a Syrian refugee. Usually Syrians have a good chance of being granted asylum in Germany.

But his application was rejected and he was ordered to be deported to Bulgaria, because he had already registered for asylum there. Officials say when they tried to deport him, they could not locate him and he remained in Germany.

Now a row has broken out about who was responsible for that failing.

Germany does not generally deport people back to unsafe countries or war-zones such as Syria, or Afghanistan - which would involve negotiating with the Taliban government. But there are calls to change that.

For years Germany has been embroiled in a controversial debate about migration. Local councils say their budgets are stretched. There are also calls to speed up the application process and allow refugees to work sooner which some say would help them integrate into German society.

Given the large numbers of refugees Germany takes in, the country generally copes well, and this year refugee numbers appear to have been dropping.

However, Germany typically takes in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers every year.

In 2023 just over 350,000 people applied for asylum. In addition, around 1.2 million Ukrainians have arrived in Germany since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Compared to other countries which take in fewer refugees, terror attacks connected to asylum seekers in Germany are rare.

The last major incident was in 2016, when 12 people were killed when an Islamist extremist drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin.

But this latest attack may have a huge political impact.

On Sunday, two large eastern German states - Saxony and Thuringia - will hold key regional elections.

The AfD, which is hoping to do well and may even win the most votes, is already using the attack as part of its campaign.

Within hours of the stabbing, the AfD - referring to the party's regional leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke - posted a video on social media captioned with the words “Höcke or Solingen”.

German far right hails 'historic' election victory in east

A French woman who was raped by unknown men over 10 years after being drugged to sleep by her husband told a court of her horror at learning how she had been abused.

Gisèle Pélicot, who is 72, was giving evidence on day three of the trial in Avignon, south-east France, of 51 men – including her husband of 50 years, Dominique. All are accused of rape.

Documents before court indicate that Dominique Pélicot, 71, admitted to police that he got satisfaction from watching other men have sex with his unconscious wife.

Many defendants in the case contest the rape charge against them, claiming that they thought they were taking part in a consensual sex game.

But Gisèle Pélicot told the court she was "never complicit" in the sexual acts and had never pretended to be asleep.

This is a case that has shocked France, all the more so because the trial is being held in public.

Gisèle waived her right to anonymity to shift the "shame" back onto the accused, her legal team has previously said.

Taking the stand on Thursday, she said she was speaking for "every woman who's been drugged without knowing it... so that no woman has to suffer."

She recalled the moment in November 2020 when she was asked by police to attend an interview alongside her husband.

He had recently been caught taking under-skirt photographs of women at a supermarket, and Gisèle told the court she believed the meeting with police was a formality related to that incident.

“The police officer asked me about my sex life,” she told the court. “I told him I had never practised partner-swapping or threesomes. I said I was a one-man woman. I couldn’t bear any man’s hands on me other than my husband’s.

“But after an hour the officer said, ‘I am going to show you some things which you will not find pleasant’. He opened a folder and he showed me a photograph.

“I did not recognise either the man or the woman asleep on the bed. The officer asked: ‘Madame, is this your bed and bedside table?’

“It was hard to recognise myself dressed up in a way that was unfamiliar. Then he showed me a second photo and a third.

“I asked him to stop. It was unbearable. I was inert, in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart.”

Gisèle said that up until then their marriage had been generally happy, and she and her husband had overcome a number of financial and health-related difficulties. She said she had forgiven the upskirting after he promised her that it had been a one-off incident.

“All that we had built together had gone. Our three children, seven grandchildren. We used to be an ideal couple.

“I just wanted to disappear. But I had to tell my children their father was under arrest. I asked my son-in-law to stay next to my daughter when I told her that her father had raped me, and had me raped by others.
“She let out a howl, whose sound is still etched on my mind.”

In the coming days, the court will hear more evidence from the investigation, about how Dominique allegedly contacted men via sex-chat websites and invited them to his suburban home in Mazan, a town north-east of Avignon.

Police claim the men were given strict instructions. They had to park at some distance from the house so as to not attract attention, and to wait for up to an hour so that the sleeping drugs which he had given Gisèle could take effect.

They further claim that, once in the home, the men were told to undress in the kitchen, and then to warm their hands with hot water or on a radiator. Tobacco and perfume were not allowed in case they awoke Gisèle. Condoms were not required.

No money changed hands.

According to the investigation, Dominique watched and filmed the proceedings, eventually creating a hard-drive file with some 4,000 photos and videos on it. It was as a result of the upskirting episode that police found the files on his computer.

Police say they have evidence of around 200 rapes carried out between 2011 and 2020, initially at their home outside Paris, but mainly in Mazan, where they moved in 2013.

Investigators allege that just over half the rapes were carried out by her husband. Most of the other men lived only a few kilometres away.

Asked Thursday by the judge if she knew any of the accused, Gisèle said she recognised only one.

“He was our neighbour. He came over to check our bikes. I used to see him at the bakery. He was always polite. I had no idea he was coming to rape me.”

Gisèle was then reminded by the judge that in order to respect the presumption of innocence, it had been agreed in court not to use the word rape but “sex scene”.

She replied: “I just think they should recognise the facts. When I think of what they have done I am overcome with disgust. They should at least have the responsibility to recognise what they did.”

After the truth emerged, Gisèle found that she was carrying four sexually-transmitted diseases.

“I have had no sympathy from any of the accused. One who was HIV-positive came six times. Not once did my husband express any concern about my health,” she said.

She is now in the process of divorcing him.

After speaking for two hours in front of Dominique and the other accused, she said: “Inside me, it is a scene of devastation. The façade may look solid... but behind it...”

Germany’s decision to tighten controls at every one of its land borders seems driven chiefly by politics, is difficult to justify in law, deals a heavy blow to Europe’s prized free movement and could severely test EU unity.

Berlin said on Monday that controls in place at its border with Austria since 2015, and since last year with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, would be extended next week to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark.

The move would curb migration and “protect against the acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime,” said Nancy Faeser, the interior minister.

The most recent in a series of deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers, in Solingen last month, came days before crunch regional elections in eastern Germany that resulted in the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party scoring historic successes in two states.

Polls show migration is also voters’ biggest concern in Brandenburg, which holds its own elections in a fortnight – with Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic party forecast to finish behind the far-right party – and the chancellor’s ailing coalition seems to be heading toward a crushing defeat in federal elections next year.

“The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and to potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” said Marcus Engler of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research.

Faeser said the new controls would include a scheme allowing more people to be turned back directly at the border, but declined to go into detail. Officials and diplomats in Brussels have expressed dismay, calling the move “transparent” and “obviously aimed at a domestic audience”.

Germany’s central position in the EU and its status as the bloc’s largest economy, mean the controls, due to come into force on 16 September for an initial six months, could have an impact that reaches far beyond the country’s voters.

In principle, Europe’s passport-free Schengen area, which was created in 1985 and now includes 25 of the 27 EU member states plus four others including Switzerland and Norway, allows free movement between them all without border controls.

Temporary checks are allowed in emergencies and exceptional circumstances to avert specific threats to internal security or public policy, and have typically been imposed after terror attacks, for major sports events and during the pandemic.

Increasingly, however, European governments, often under pressure from far-right rhetoric on immigration, have reimposed checks without the justification of concrete and specific threats, or clear arguments as to how controls can help mitigate them.

Although immigration policies and asylum follow-up procedures, for example, are decided nationally, European free movement, many observers argue, makes for an easy target – and “taking back control of borders” for effective headlines.

Besides Germany, Schengen members currently operating controls on particular borders include Austria, which cites Ukraine-related security threats and pressure on asylum to check arrivals from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary.

Denmark, citing terror threats related to the war in Gaza and Russian espionage risks, is carrying out checks on land and sea transit from Germany, and France is checking Schengen zone arrivals on the grounds of an increased terror threat.

Italy, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Finland are also operating border checks, variously citing terrorist activity, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Russian intelligence activity, increased migration flows and organised crime in the Balkans.

As the guarantor of the Schengen treaty, the European Commission – which was notified of Germany’s plans on Monday – has generally accepted member states’ justifications for reintroducing temporary controls without demur.

Observers expect it to do the same for Berlin’s demand, despite the fact that there appears to be little clear practical justification – beyond an electoral threat from the anti-immigration far right – for checks on all nine of the country’s borders.

The commission said on Tuesday that member states were allowed to take such a step to address “a serious threat”, but the measures needed to be “necessary and proportionate” and must “remain strictly exceptional”.

The temporary German controls “represent a manifestly disproportionate breach of the principle of free movement within the Schengen area,” said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European law at HEC Paris.

“It won’t fly under EU law – yet will this dissuade Scholz from going ahead?” he said. Christopher Wratil of the University of Vienna was even more scathing, accusing Berlin of “governing as if the AfD were [already] in power”.

After today, Wratil said, German politicians “should no longer tell me that somebody else is failing to comply with EU law … Wanting to wipe out Schengen with a mere stroke of the pen – and entirely without thinking.”

Others noted the economic value of the Schengen zone. A report by the Bertelsmann Foundation as long ago as 2016 estimated the reintroduction of internal border controls would cost Europe about €470bn (£397bn) in lost growth over 10 years.

Gerald Knaus, the chair of the European Stability Initiative think tank, also questioned the measure’s efficacy. “Internal border controls that are intended to have any effect mean the end of Schengen,” Knaus said on X.

They would also require “federal border protection and fences around Germany” and, moreover, “will fail if neighbours are not interested in participating,” he said.

After the EU finally agreed a hard-fought overhaul to its asylum and migration laws earlier this year, with the rules only due to come into force in 2026, European unity could be seriously tested if Germany asks its neighbours to take back large numbers.

Austria has already said it will refuse to take back any migrants refused at the German border, while the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, on Tuesday called Berlin’s decision “unacceptable” and demanded urgent consultations.

Brexit red tape on British businesses has caused goods trade between the UK and EU to slump and the problem is getting worse, a study has warned.

Many smaller UK producers have given up exporting small amounts to the EU after facing more rules and regulations, a report by Aston University Business School has found.

Between 2021 and 2023, the study calculated that UK goods exports to the EU were down 27% and imported goods were 32% lower than where they would have been had Brexit not happened.

The report does not include the service sector, which has performed better than many experts had expected since Brexit.

The variety of trade export goods has also dropped, the study found, with 1,645 fewer types of British products exported to every EU country.

The authors said this is due to smaller British producers giving up on exporting consignments to some EU nations after facing increased red tape.

Mary Quicke of Quicke's Cheeses in Devon told the BBC's Today programme that she had found it "really, really difficult to deal with all the regulatory burdens".

She said she used to supply four customers directly in the EU but "we had to give them away to somebody else".

"We just don't have the people to do the paperwork.”