The leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, has called on parliament to urgently vote on closing the country's borders after a knife attack in Aschaffenburg in southern Germany, DPA reported, quoted by BTA.
Weidel, who is the AfD's candidate for chancellor in the February 23 elections, said that the conservative CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) bloc should lift the "cordon sanitaire" against cooperation with the AfD to pass a law to “close the borders and return illegal migrants“.
“There should be no more victims because of the cordon sanitaire“, Weidel wrote in a post in “Ex“ today, after two people, including a 2-year-old child, were stabbed to death last night by a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan.
Conservative leader Friedrich Merz has repeatedly ruled out cooperating with the AfD, which is in second place in opinion polls.
Last year, Germany introduced border checks despite the rules of the Schengen area for free movement, DPA recalls.
Foreign Minister Nancy Feser has indicated that she intends to extend the border checks beyond March 2025.
Bavaria's state premier Markus Söder has also called for "closing the borders to illegal migration". "Our main goal must be security," said Söder, who is also the leader of the Bavarian conservative CSU. The CSU is in a national alliance with the CDU. Söder said Germany was a humane country. "However, this should not come at the expense of our own population," he added. A possible future CDU/CSU government would therefore have "zero tolerance and zero compromise" on migration as its guiding principle, he said. The Bavarian premier said he had agreed on a fundamental change in migration policy with the CDU/CSU's chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. Söder said the conservative bloc wanted fewer people to enter Germany and more to leave. According to him, for this to happen, the police must be allowed to turn migrants back from Germany's borders and deportations must be stepped up.