Attack in Solingen: Chancellor holds talks with opposition | Olaf Scholz

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has met with the country's opposition leader to discuss changing immigration policy and expanding deportations following Friday's deadly knife attack linked to Islamic State.

After the attack in Solingen, in which a Syrian who had applied for asylum in Germany is said to have killed three people and injured eight, the meeting between Scholz and the leader of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), Friedrich Merz, was referred to by the media as the “Solingen summit”. Details of the meeting in Berlin were not published. Merz is due to hold a press conference later on Tuesday.

Merz, who is considered Scholz's main challenger in the federal elections in September 2025, called for a “turning point” in Germany's “naive” migration policy.

At an election rally in Dresden on Monday, he presented the government with a list of demands that included a ban on asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan entering Germany. He also declared that his CDU/CSU coalition was “ready” to jointly pass “sensible laws” if Scholz's Social Democrats were unable to find a sufficient majority for reforms in the three-party coalition.

The attacks, which took place on Friday evening during the celebrations for the 650th anniversary of the city of Solingen, were taken up by the extreme right and fuelled political pressure over asylum and deportation policy in the run-up to the three important state elections in September.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which leads the way with its anti-immigration program, is leading the polls in Saxony and Thuringia, where elections will take place on Sunday, and in Brandenburg three weeks later.

In Germany, the attacks sparked demonstrations involving both anti-racism activists and far-right demonstrators. Police said on Tuesday that they had launched an investigation after racist slogans and at least one Hitler salute were heard at a far-right rally in Solingen.

During a visit to Solingen on Monday, Scholz promised faster enforcement of existing deportation regulations and stricter gun laws in response to the attack. He said his center-left government was ready to “do everything in our power to ensure that something like this never happens again.”

This includes developing ways to return rejected asylum seekers more quickly either to their country of origin – if this is considered safe – or to the EU country in which they first applied for asylum.

CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann called on Scholz on Tuesday to recognize that a “paradigm shift” was necessary in his government's migration policy. “The Chancellor must realize that things cannot continue like this,” he said. The attacks in Solingen were the last straw, and “social cohesion” was at stake, he told broadcaster DLF.

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann of the business-friendly FDP said he was against a freeze on the admission of asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan. A blanket ban on the admission of people from certain countries was neither in line with German nor EU law. He stressed that it was important to “talk about the number and distribution of refugees coming to Europe” and told ARD that it was not right to say “nobody can come to us anymore”.

Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said that any agreements must be “appropriate” and must not violate the German constitution or the UN Human Rights Charter.

Dietmar Woidke, Prime Minister of the northern state of Brandenburg, where state elections will take place on September 22, said in an interview that “parts of the population have lost their sense of security.” He added: “We need quick solutions that can also be implemented legally.”

In an interview with the Funke Media Group, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser stressed that the introduction of the new principles had already created a sufficient legal framework under which deportations could take place: “However, the key to success is that the new rules are also correctly applied at the state level,” she said.