Munich Car Attack Intensifies Spotlight on Immigration in German Election

A car is lifted onto a tow truck at the scene where a car was driven into a labor union demonstration in Munich on Feb. 13, 2025. Matthias Balk/dpa via AP

With just days to go before voters head to the polls in Germany, concerns about immigration, economic, and security issues have taken center stage following a string of violent attacks involving asylum-seekers.

A series of high-profile terror attacks, including a recent one in Munich, has intensified public debate on immigration before voters head to the polls on Feb. 23.

According to analysts, the news that an Afghan asylum-seeker plowed into a crowd in Munich on Feb. 13—injuring at least 30 people—could play a major role in voters’ decisions.

“The Munich event especially, is going to have an impact on elections,” Richard Schenk, research fellow at the think tank MCC Brussels, told The Epoch Times.

He explained that in Germany, the electorate typically takes about a week to absorb and react to an issue.

“It’s basically 10 days before elections, and it’s perfect timing if you want to launch an agenda,” Schenk said.

Like many European nations, Germany has been dogged by economic woes, and shifting political tides, which eventually caused the collapse of the coalition government, sparking the election.

Europe’s largest manufacturing economy is in its second year of contraction, struggling with the loss of affordable Russian gas, historic Volkswagen plant closures, and fierce competition from cheaper Chinese electric vehicles.

Immigration

In the past few years, the coalition involving Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), and the Green Party have lost ground.

Mainstream parties are also contending with the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is calling for strict border controls, a reduction in asylum-seekers, ditching net zero requirements, preserving what it sees as traditional German culture, and saying that “Islam does not belong to Germany.”

While AfD—supported by Elon Musk—is projected to finish as the second-largest party, it remains politically sidelined by a strict cordon sanitaire from mainstream parties, preventing it from entering government.

Some local state authorities have officially classed some of AfD’s branches, the Young Alternative Thuringia and Saxony sections, as “right-wing extremists.”

AfD, together with the left-wing political newcomer Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), is the most hardline on immigration.

Other establishment parties have also increasingly moved away from long-standing progressive stances on immigration.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a media briefing in Berlin on Nov. 5, 2024. Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Germany reintroduced border checks in September 2024 as part of a tougher stance on migration and cross-border crime, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that he is extending those controls for six months from Feb 12.

“Anyone here who is not a German citizen and commits crimes of this kind must also expect us to take him out of this country, take him away, and deport him,” Scholz told public broadcaster ZDF, after the Munich attack.

The country is still reeling from multiple high-profile terror attacks.

In December 2024, six people were killed in a Christmas market attack in Magdeburg.

Last month, a toddler and an adult were killed in a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg.

In August 2024, a 26-year-old Syrian suspect was arrested after a mass stabbing at a festival in Solingen, where three people were killed and eight wounded. The suspect turned himself in a day after the attack at the “Festival of Diversity,” which was celebrating Solingen’s 650th anniversary.

The ISIS terrorist group claimed responsibility for the stabbing.

Schenk noted that these incidents often involve asylum-seekers or people already known to law enforcement.

He said that “every time it was obvious” that law enforcement agencies were completely overwhelmed with the number of migrants who were causing problems, and who needed to be deported.

“The courts are overwhelmed. The migration offices are overwhelmed, and it’s clear that something needs to be done about this issue,” Schenk said.

According to official crime statistics, 34.4 percent of criminal suspects in 2023 were non-German citizens, a 13.5 percent increase from the previous year, compared with a 1 percent rise among German citizens.

Non-German citizens make up 15 percent of the population.

The country has gone through a major population change, with Germany’s net population increasing by more than 3.5 million between 2014 and 2024, driven entirely by migration.

Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 accepted more than 1 million Syrian refugees into Germany.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 80 percent of Germans believe that immigration levels have been too high over the past decade.

Schenk speculated that by now, those strongly opposed to immigration have likely made up their minds about whom to vote for.

“This is a series of terrorist attacks that already have polarized the people. So I think the people who want to vote for AfD, they have already decided this month,” he said.

However, Schenk noted that some voters could shift their support rightward, perhaps from the Greens to the Social Democrats, or from the Social Democrats to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

An election campaign billboard for the Alternative for Germany party and top candidate for the federal election Alice Weidel (R); and Robert Habeck, economy and climate action minister and Greens Party chancellor candidate, in Berlin on Jan. 26, 2025. Maja Hitij/Getty Images

‘General Sense of Malaise’

Ralph Schoellhammer, political theorist and head of the Center for Applied History at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, told The Epoch Times that while immigration is a major issue, the underlying frustration goes beyond that.

“There is a general sense among a growing segment of the population: Things are no longer working the way they used to,” he said.

“Whether it’s infrastructure, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s migration, whether it’s education, it’s a general sense of malaise.

“There is a sense that the current forces in politics, or the dominant forces, are managing decline.”

Under the German electoral and political system, absolute majorities are less common, meaning that coalition governments are often formed as a result.

The most likely scenario is a coalition consisting of the CDU, SPD, and FDP.

Another possibility is involving the CDU, left-wing Greens, and FDP.

According to Schoellhammer, polls are putting the CDU at about 30 percent, and the AfD at between 19 percent and 23 percent.

Smaller parties, such as the new left-wing but socially conservative BSW and the hard-left Left Party, are hovering between 4 percent and 6 percent.

Under German rules, if they get over the 5 percent threshold, they will be in Parliament, which can make all the difference for potential future coalition negotiations.

He said this makes German politics “both very exciting, but also quite unpredictable” because a 1 percent or 2 percent vote increase “could entirely change the arithmetic when it comes to forming a future government.”

No Deals With the AfD

Despite that the AfD is projected to win 142 seats in the Bundestag, Schoellhammer said he doesn’t think that the party will be part of forming a government.

“I think it’s easy, actually, to say who is not going to be part of a future government. And that’s going to be the AfD,” he said.

“There will be no deals with the AfD. They will remain in opposition unless—but that is not impossible, but highly unlikely—unless they would massively surprise on the upper end.”

There are questions about whether the CDU under leader Friedrich Merz will absorb some of the AfD’s messaging.

Merz and Scholz have taken a hawkish stance on immigration, but the former has wavered on issues such as nuclear energy.

Germany decommissioned its last three operating nuclear power plants in April 2023, following a 2011 decision by Merkel, who was chancellor at the time.

Merz looked at the possibility of restarting operations but appeared to dismiss this option in January.

Schoellhammer said that none of the political hot topics such as returning to nuclear, strict immigration policies, or reforming the welfare state, will be addressed in this scenario.

“All of these things that would need to be reformed ... he’s not going to have a partner to do that,” he said.

Schoellhammer said that people will vote for Merz because they want a center-right government, but they’re probably going to end up “getting a slightly left-of-center government because he’s standing alone.”

He said Merz has “completely destroyed negotiations” by stating that he would never govern with the AfD.

“He’s telling the Greens and the Social Democrats, ‘I can only negotiate with you,’” Schoellhammer said.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk speaks live via a video transmission during the election campaign launch rally of AfD supporters, in Halle, Germany, on Jan. 25, 2025. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Germany is not alone in its voters wanting right-wing policies. The shift mirrors a broader movement across Europe that has replaced both left- and right-wing establishment parties in government.

For example, for the first time, a poll this month put the right-wing Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, ahead of the two establishment parties that have dominated British politics for more than a century.

Countries including France, Germany, Austria, and Sweden, have also shifted toward right-wing parties and policies.

“This is a trend across the Western world. I think in Europe, it’s a trend that’s very connected to poor economic performance,” Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs, and director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, told The Epoch Times at the time.

De-industrialization

Germany represents the industrial powerhouse of Europe, but a binding undertaking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 has affected that status.

Earlier this year, Volkswagen, Germany’s largest industrial employer and Europe’s top carmaker by revenue, said it was targeting $11 billion in savings by 2026 to survive the transition to electric cars amid cheaper Chinese competition.

The company also faces significant challenges because of high energy costs.

According to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), as reported by state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), more than 5,000 small to medium-sized companies filed for bankruptcy in Germany in the first three months of 2024.

DW expects that number to increase to 20,000 cases as part of a longer-term pattern.

“The backbone of the German economy is under serious strain,” Schoellhammer said.

East Germany

The AfD’s success is not evenly distributed across Germany. The party remains strongest in the former East Germany.

“The difference is, of course, that in East Germany, the relation to German history is somewhat different, because, I think, not unjustifiably so, that in East Germany, the argument is, well, after having lived through communism for 50 years, we have paid back their debt on history,” Schoellhammer said.

Arguments that the “AfD is a Nazi party” resonate in western Germany because they touch on a very sensitive point, he said. But the historical guilt doesn’t work to that extent in eastern Germany.

Schoellhammer sees a long-term shift happening in German politics, one that could see the AfD grow even stronger if mainstream parties fail to respond to voters’ concerns.

He said that there is a perception by the legacy parties that whenever somebody votes for another party, this is “just a temporary phenomenon.”

“As time progresses, they do not understand there’s a genuine risk that these legacy parties will disappear because those voters, those voters don’t return. And we have pretty good evidence that this is taking place,” Schoellhammer said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.