German national, state and mainstream opposition leaders are set to hold closed-door talks at the Interior Ministry in Berlin later on Tuesday and discuss other related issues.
The talks come in the wake of other comparable events in recent weeks and months.
It also followed two days later.
The suspect in the Solingen case is a Syrian national and alleged Islamist extremist who was known to authorities and who managed to avoid deportation before the attack. Three people were killed and eight more injured. Investigators say he confessed during questioning.
The case progressed over the following days.
Who is participating?
The Chancellor is not present at this meeting, but his government and the relevant ministers of all its constituent parties are.
Interior Minister Nancy Fesser (of Scholz’s Social Democrats) will chair the session, which will also be attended by Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (of the FDP) and Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock (of the Greens).
Two senior members of the center-right Christian Democrats, the national opposition leader, Thorsten Frei (of the CDU) and Andrea Lindholz (of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party CSU) are also taking part.
Finally, leading representatives of Germany’s 16 state governments – many of which are made up of different combinations of parties compared to the national level – are invited.
In the long term, any meaningful changes will require consensus among all these stakeholders to be passed and then effectively implemented.
What is in the proposed post-Sollingen security package?
Scholz’s government last week proposed stricter rules on carrying knives in public, changes to benefit entitlements for asylum seekers and more police powers to address suspected Islamist threats.
Asylum seekers who registered in a different EU country before coming to Germany will no longer be eligible for social welfare payments.
The proposal also aims to make it easier to deport people who have committed a crime with a firearm.
Interior Minister Nancy Fesser billed the changes as “far-reaching” and “draconian.”
A spokeswoman for her ministry said ahead of the talks that the package would serve as an “essential basis” for Tuesday’s meeting.
“In addition to the package, we have made it clear that we are open to proposals from the CDU/CSU and the federal states and will discuss these with each other,” he said.
Speaking on ZDF public television early Tuesday morning, Green Party politician Omid Nouripour warned against expecting too much.
“Every idea is welcome,” he said, “only it needs to make sense, it needs to be implemented and it needs to follow the law.”
CDU’s Merz calls for focus on ‘decreasing migration’
The CDU leader, who will not attend the session in person, said on Tuesday after the anti-immigrant AfD’s success in state elections in Thuringia and Saxony that talks needed to focus more on numbers in general.
Merz said the real problem in the eyes of the CDU was fewer arms regulations or deportations and more “persistent uncontrolled migration pressure”.
“If the [federal] If the coalition wants to talk to us about a solution, then item 1 on the agenda should be limiting migration,” he said. Merz argued that for every five deportations, another 100 could come, saying “you solve a problem like this. can’t.”
He said that if such ideas are not on the table, there will be no further conversation.
“In that case we don’t need more round tables, we don’t need more therapeutic discussions,” he said.
Although the Solingen attack appears to be the most direct prompt for this meeting, it is one of many comparable events in recent weeks and months in Germany and near misses. This comes amid warnings of a growing Islamist terrorism threat as an indirect result of conflict in Gaza and the wider Middle East and dissatisfaction with Germany’s support for Israel.
It is not clear what announcements or comments may follow the afternoon closed-door session, which is scheduled to begin at 3 pm local time (1300 UTC/GMT). As of early Tuesday, no press conference or federal government press release had been scheduled.
msh/lo (AFP, dpa, KNA)
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