German far right seizes on knife attack ahead of crucial state elections

BERLIN — A brutal knife attack in the German city of Solingen has reignited a debate about public security a week ahead of important state elections in eastern Germany, with the far right hammering the government coalition and other parties over alleged shortcomings.
Three people were killed and others injured eight others late Friday. The suspected attacker, who was identified is an asylum-seeker from Syria, turned himself in to police late Saturday. He is being investigated by the German federal prosecutor’s office for suspected terrorism.
Islamic State late Saturday claimed responsibility for the killings.
Even before any details about the assailant were released, the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) immediately was framing the killings as a migrant attack.
“Germans, Thuringians, do you really want to get used to these conditions? Free yourselves; finally put an end to the wrong path of forced multiculturalization!” Björn Höcke, the AfD’s lead candidate in Thüringen, wrote on X. Thüringen heads to the polls on Sept. 1, along with neighboring Saxony.
Höcke, who is leading election surveys in Thüringen, urged the people to “vote for change” and send “the responsible cartel parties into the desert,” adding: “There can be no more like this!”
The AfD is attacking not only the ruling coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats, but also the two main opposition parties, the center-right CDU/CSU and the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht alliance, which are the AfD’s main opponents in both state elections.
In Saxony, where the AfD is neck-and-neck with the CDU, the party wrote on X that the CDU would “do NOTHING to change the current situation” and pursue “a policy of open borders with even more migration” at the EU level.
“Change is only possible with us,” argued AfD Bundestag lawmaker Nicole Höchst.
The far-right volleys of criticism, amid a lack of information on the assailant, recalled the recent riots in the U.K. that were fanned by false claims that a suspected attacker was a newly arrived immigrant. The stabbing of three girls in Southport in late July sparked days of violence across Britain with far-right groups accused of inflaming violent disorder. 
Scholz called the attack in Solingen “a terrible event that has shocked me greatly.” At an election rally on Saturday in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, which also holds elections next month, on Sept. 21, the chancellor said that “we must not accept something like this in our society … The full force of the law must be applied here.”
Scholz has made similar comments following previous incidents in Germany, such as the gruesome killing of a police officer by a man from Afghanistan at the end of May. The chancellor vowed to enforce tougher migration policies and step up deportations, even to Syria and Afghanistan.
The new attack on Friday is raising the political pressure as it risks feeding the narrative of the far right that the Scholz government is talking too much and acting too little.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who in a first reaction on Saturday expressed her condolences to the victims, was criticized by Florian Hahn, a lawmaker from the center-right CSU opposition, who accused her of alleged shortcomings on security. “It can’t go on like this,” Hahn wrote on X.
Center-right opposition leader Friedrich Merz was more moderate in his reaction, writing: “This barbaric violence is unbearable. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families. We wish them all much strength in these hours.”