Germany announced plans to impose tougher controls at all land borders to tackle irregular migration following a knife attack that left three people dead in Solingen.
The controls within what is normally a wide area of free movement – the European Schengen zone – will start on 16 September and initially last for six months, interior minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday.
A 56-year-old woman and two men in their 50s were killed and eight others suffered injuries in a knife attack in front of one of the festival stages in the city’s central square, the Fronhof, in August. Isis claimed the attack, saying the suspect was a “soldier of the Islamic State”.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz‘s government has been under pressure from the opposition far-right and conservatives to take stricter measures to control migration after a Syrian national was arrested for the knife attack.
The government has also designed a scheme enabling authorities to reject more migrants directly at German borders, Ms Faeser said.
“We are strengthening internal security and continuing our hard line against irregular migration,” Ms Faeser said, adding that the government notified the European Commission and neighbouring countries of the intended controls.
“We are doing everything in our power to protect the people of our country against these threats,” she added.
The AfD earlier this month became the first far-right party since World War II to win a state election in Thuringia in central Germany after campaigning heavily on the issue of migration.
Polls showed that the issue was also voters’ top concern in the state of Brandenburg, which is set to hold elections in two weeks.
Mr Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting to retain control of the government there, in a vote billed as a test of strength of the SPD ahead of next year’s federal election.
A backlash had been building in Germany ever since it took in more than a million people mostly fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria during the 2015 and 2016 migrant crisis, migration experts said.
It reached a tipping point in the country of 84 million people after it automatically granted asylum to around a million Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s 2022 invasion even as Germany was struggling through an energy and economic crisis.
Since then, the German government has agreed tighter deportation rules and resumed flying convicted criminals of Afghan nationality to their home country, despite suspending deportations after the Taliban took power in 2021 due to human rights concerns.
Berlin last year also announced stricter controls on its land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland. Those and controls on the border with Austria had allowed it to return 30,000 migrants since October 2023, it said on Monday.
Germany shares its more than 3,700km-long land border with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.
Gerhard Karner, the Austrian interior minister, said his country would not take in any migrants turned away by Germany at the border. “There’s no room for manoeuvre there,” he told Bild newspaper.
Additional reporting by agencies