German chancellor is again under fire from political opponents who lay the blame for Berlin attack on her refugee strategy

Angela Merkel has vowed she will not allow Germany to be “paralysed by fear” after rightwing populist politicians rushed to blame the chancellor and her refugee policies for Monday evening’s deadly truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

Speaking at her chancellery on Tuesday morning, Merkel was quick to sketch out a worst-case scenario – unusually for a politician who prefers to deal in pragmatic solutions.

“Given our current information, we have to assume we are dealing with a terrorist attack,” she told reporters. But she added: “We do not want to live paralysed by the fear of evil. Even if it is difficult in these hours, we will find the strength for the life we want to live in Germany – free, together and open.”

Political opponents rejected her plea for unity, renewing their criticism of her refugee strategy and laying the blame for the attack unambiguously at her door.

“The environment in which such acts can spread was carelessly and systematically imported over the past one and a half years,” said Frauke Petry, leader of the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). “It was not an isolated incident and it won’t be the last.”



Petry’s partner, MEP Marcus Pretzell, posted a message on Twitter for what he called the “Let’s-wait-and-see brigade” less than an hour after the attack: “This is what happens when you wait and see”.

Marcus Pretzell (@MarcusPretzell) An die "Erstmal-abwarten-Fraktion": Sowas kommt von abwarten.#Breitscheidplatz

Horst Seehofer, the leader of Merkel’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, criticised her policies in more diplomatic but no less forceful terms: “We owe it to the victims, to those affected and to the whole population to rethink our immigration and security policy and to change it.”



When she appeared before the television cameras on Tuesday morning, Merkel did not shy away from the possible ramifications of the attacker being identified as a refugee or migrant. “I know that it would be particularly hard to bear for all of us if it was confirmed that a person committed this crime who asked for protection and asylum in Germany,” she said.



That confirmation appeared to follow soon after the end of her press conference, only to be withdrawn just a couple of hours later.

As Merkel, together with the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, were laying down flowers at the site where the truck had crashed into the side of a Christmas market, the chief of Berlin’s police admitted it was unclear whether the suspect they had arrested shortly after the attack was indeed the driver behind the deadly rampage. Later, the man – a 23-year-old Pakistani citizen who had arrived in Germany on 31 December 2015 – was released.

The political significance of Monday night’s tragedy, however, had by then been made clear.

At the end of a year in which Merkel has seen some of her closest allies on the international stage succumb to populist anger – including US President Barack Obama, David Cameron in Britain, François Hollande in France and Matteo Renzi in Italy – and just before the start of a year in which she is determined to avoid a similar fate, a deadly attack on German soil was precisely what her supporters feared most.

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Whatever the ongoing investigations into the perpetrator’s motives reveal, the German chancellor will be faced with part of her electorate asking if the tragedy came about as a direct result of her policy decisions last year, when Merkel kept open Germany’s borders for refugees stranded in Hungary.

Reactions to the Berlin attack have already shown the extent to which an answer to that question is ideological. Hajo Funke, a politics professor at Berlin’s Free University, suggested that Merkel would get little political mileage out of atoning for past decisions. “Germany’s voters will choose politicians based on whether they have workable political answers, not empty promises,” he said. “The AfD has no actual solutions to the terrorist problem and 90% of the population sees that.”

Merkel’s approval ratings dropped considerably after two terrorist attacks in southern Germany in the summer, but recently recovered to the levels the chancellor enjoyed before the start of the refugee crisis.

While recent polls have put Petry’s party on 12-13%, Funke argued that the “base of political power” in Germany’s coalition-based political system would continue to lie with Merkel’s Christian Democrats, currently on 33-36%, the centre-left Social Democrats (21-23%) and the Green party (10-11%).

Yet in the wake of Monday’s attack, even shoring up that base of support will require Merkel to do more to assure her electorate that she can guarantee their safety. At the Christian Democrats’ conference earlier this month, it was clear that a party that once stood faithfully behind its leader now contained a backbench cabal agitating for a rightward lurch.

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Merkel has repeatedly shown that she is less averse to populist gestures on a domestic stage than her international admirers give her credit for: since September 2015, her government has gradually restricted the list of countries whose citizens can rightfully claim asylum in Germany, a point underlined by a series of high-profile deportations to Afghanistan that commenced last week.

Last month, the German chancellor even endorsed her party’s proposal for a ban of the full facial veil. She placed a caveat on her demand in characteristic style with the phrase “wherever it is legally possible” – a move echoed on Tuesday when she vowed that the perpetrator of the Berlin truck attack would be punished “as severely as our laws demand”.

Even in the centre of the political spectrum, the room for manoeuvre is not limitless, however.

After Monday’s attack, and following a high-profile hunt for a man filmed kicking a young woman down a flight of stairs at a Berlin metro station, there may be an opportunity for Merkel to take a more hawkish stance on the use of CCTV surveillance in public space, traditionally a sensitive issue in privacy-conscious Germany.

But after almost two years of a highly polemicised political debate over the refugee crisis, some policy avenues are now permanently closed to the chancellor.

A set upper limit on the number of refugees who can enter the country – which many in her party believe would have reassured traditional conservatives – is out of the question because it would amount to a climbdown in her ongoing standoff with Seehofer and thus a serious loss of face.

Merkel has gone way beyond the point where she can ever win back members of the AfD and their dyed-in-the-wool supporters. Arguably she does not need to, but a loss of political authority, and a party that tacks right while she steers left, could fatally undermine her campaign for a fourth term in next year’s elections.