Sadness, anger, frustration and many questions to answer. Germany has been left in that state after the multiple car accident last Friday at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, the capital of the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, which killed five people – including a child – and left 200 injured, many of them they serious. Two of the many questions that remain to be resolved are why Taleb A. rammed a high-powered car rented into the mass of visitors and, above all, why the authorities did not react sooner to prevent the accident.
Taleb A., a citizen of Saudi origin who has lived in Germany for almost two decades, had received asylum in the country in 2016 and worked as a psychiatrist. However, before receiving protection, he had been involved in various incidents with authorities, and had hinted that he was willing to commit acts of violence. The authorities had received indications from both the Saudi secret services and other citizens about the potential danger of Taleb A. All of this has fueled the debate in the middle of the electoral campaign on the application of the asylum law, immigration policy and the internal security of the country.
The profile of the attacker raises even more questions: unlike what was initially thought about a jihadist background to the attack, Taleb A. had become an enemy of Islam after apostatizing, launching Islamophobic messages on his social networks and even publicly sympathized with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in your social network profile.
In this last channel, which had been active since 2016, Taleb A. presented himself as a member of the “Saudi military opposition”, accused Germany of “wanting to Islamize Europe” and former Chancellor Angela Merkel of “having destroyed Europe”, all this under the photo of an automatic rifle as the header of his profile. Taleb A. also advised Saudi compatriots through a website on how to request asylum in Germany.
No signs of terrorism
The Federal Prosecutor has refused to take on the investigation. This means that it rules out a political or religious motivation for the Magdeburg attack, cases in which the Attorney General’s Office takes charge of the proceedings. He weekly “Der Spiegel” reports that the police found a kind of will in the attacker’s car. In it, he asked to donate his assets to the German Red Cross. According to several German media and agencies citing sources from the investigation, the authorities are increasingly giving strength to the hypothesis that mental disorder motivated the indiscriminate attack.
All of this is indifferent to the AfD: its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, and other leaders of the ultra party have not hesitated to talk about a jihadist attack, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it. Before several thousand people, Weidel said this Monday at an event organized by his party in the center of Magdeburg that the attack had been the work of “an Islamist full of hate.” Björn Höcke, head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia and leader of the most radical wing of the AfD, has openly questioned the German authorities’ version of the attack.
The fact that the Magdeburg attack was committed by a person openly in line with the AfD discourse forces the German extreme right to establish a discursive framework that favors it in the midst of an electoral campaign that is expected to be tough: in addition to continuing to affirm that This is an Islamist attack, AfD reinforces accusations that German authorities have lost control of the country’s internal security and borders.
Reaction of the rest of the parties
Beyond the expressions of pain and solidarity with the victims, the rest of the parties are trying to react to the opportunistic attacks of the extreme right to avoid a greater bleeding of votes towards a party that borders on neo-Nazism. Polls have placed the AfD as the second force in voting intentions for months with close to 20%. The Magdeburg attack could push the AfD even further electorally if the rest of the parties do not know how to react effectively to the opportunism of Weidel and Höcke’s party.
The social democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who until now had tried to focus the electoral campaign on the axes of social justice and peace, have reacted through the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, one of the greats pointed out for the security errors that explain in part the Magdeburg attack. Faeser is committed to providing more resources to the federal police, allowing biometric recognition of the faces and voices of terrorist suspects, murderers and rapists, as well as the storage of IP addresses to monitor citizen activity on the Internet.
These latest measures especially generate rejection among the Greens and the liberals of the FDP, considering that they represent an attack on the right to citizen privacy. The conservatives of the CDU do show themselves open to reaching an agreement on a “security package” even before the early elections on February 23.
Meanwhile, AfD followers chant “reemigration, reemigration” in the marches and rallies called by the leadership of the ultra party. That is the word used, among others, by the influencer Austrian Martin Sellner to defend the deportation of millions of citizens of foreign origin residing in Germany.
The deportation plan was one of the points addressed at the secret meeting held in the city of Potsdam in the fall of 2023. Sellner participated in that meeting along with AfD representatives and German businessmen. The Magdeburg attack is a new opportunity to publicly defend, in the middle of the electoral campaign, a plan rejected by the rest of the German political parties.
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