Germany is set to expand border checks following a knife attack that left three people dead in the town of Solingen in August. The government has come under pressure to take a harder line on immigration since the stabbing, in which the suspect is a Syrian national who was facing deportation after a failed asylum bid. The attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group. The new controls - which will be introduced on 16 September and initially last six months - were announced days after the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) made big gains in local elections. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser insisted the government was "taking a hard line" against irregular migration, and said the checks would reduce Islamist extremism and cross-border crime. "We are doing everything in our power to protect the people of our country against these threats," she added. Germany already has controls at its eastern and southern borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Austria, primarily spot checks on roads and in trains. Similar measures will be introduced at all border points. However, critics said the move is more about politics than security. Germany's mainstream parties were thrown into turmoil by the AfD's performance in regional elections in the east, which saw a far-right party top a poll for the first time since the Nazi era. The governing SPD and other mainstream parties appear to have viewed the results as a message from voters to take a tougher stance on immigration and borders. Successive governments in Berlin have allowed relatively large numbers of asylum seekers to settle in the country in recent years. Germany took in more than one million people mostly fleeing war in countries such as Syria during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis, and has received 1.2 million Ukrainians since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. However, with polls indicating the AfD could perform strongly in a regional election in Brandenburg on 22 September, parties on both the center-left and centre-right are coming up with proposals that would have been unthinkable until recently. The CDU - the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel - has proposed turning all asylum seekers back at the border, even those who are eligible, on the basis they have traveled through other safe EU countries. Gerhard Karner, Austria's interior minister, told Bild newspaper on Monday that his country would not take in any migrants rejected by Germany. "There's no room for maneuver there," he said. Since the Solingen stabbing, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government has announced a raft of measures on migration. They include changing the rules so asylum seekers facing deportation will lose benefits, and resuming the deportation of convicted Afghan criminals to their home country for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. — BBC
