It was the most brutal attack on a trade union event in the history of post-war Germany. Last Thursday, just days before the general election, a man drove a car into a group of striking members of the service workers’ union Verdi in Munich. The attack has so far claimed the lives of a mother and her two-year-old daughter, and injured at least 30 others.
The suspect is a 24-year-old Afghan national who arrived in Germany eight years ago as an unaccompanied minor and was subsequently granted residence status. According to police reports, he had previously shared Islamist content on social media. Upon his arrest, he shouted “Allahu akbar”, leading authorities to classify the incident as “most likely” Islamist-motivated.
Anger is surely the right response to such a barbaric attack on workers and their families who were exercising their democratic right to campaign for better working conditions. Yet, almost immediately after the incident made headlines, the Verdi leadership issued a statement condemning any “misplaced passion” that might arise from the act: “We stand for solidarity and togetherness. In its darkest hour, ver.di defends itself against the attack on ver.di colleagues during a token strike in Munich being used for division, hatred and incitement,” the statement said. A statement by Frank Werneke, the Verdi leader, which carefully avoided any mention of the word ‘Islamism’, was similarly muddled.
This is no coincidence. Werneke is a member of the ruling SPD, and the brutal attack has intensified pressure on Germany’s coalition government, once again exposing critical failures in security and the asylum system. Just days earlier, following another deadly attack by an Afghan asylum seeker that claimed the lives of a toddler and a man, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) himself admitted being “fed up with such acts of violence happening here every few weeks.”
Yet now, government allies like Werneke appear determined to silence legitimate concerns, suggesting that anyone who points to specific migration issues is somehow exploiting tragedy. The public messaging, both by the union and sectors of the media, quickly emphasized that the murdered trade unionist, an engineer, had a “migration background” herself (having arrived in Germany at age four from Algeria) and that her family requested “restraint,” noting her advocacy for tolerance.
All this manoeuvring is deeply disingenuous. It shouldn’t matter whether the victims have a migrant background or not—this distraction misses the fundamental point. It’s not about identity; it’s about the basic duty of the state to protect all its citizens.
In truth, even before last Thursday, migration had become the dominant and most controversial election issue. The growing pressure on the government was reflected in its announcement, after the Aschaffenburg incident, that it would speed up deportations and extend the border controls introduced last September for another six months.
Polling suggests these measures have failed to restore public confidence. The ruling SPD now struggles below 15%, battling its coalition partner, the Greens, merely for third place.
The public’s distrust of the government on migration issues isn’t hard to comprehend. The reactions to this latest attack have followed a predictable and revealing pattern: despite expressions of shock after each incident, there’s always a coordinated effort from establishment voices to control the public narrative and deflect criticism of migration policies. Their primary concern appears to be containing populist pressure rather than honestly and seriously addressing the underlying issues that fuel it.
For many weeks now, pro-government demonstrations have swept through German cities, directed against the right-populist AfD, and campaigning to exclude both the party and its voters from government participation. There’s a stark and dark irony in the fact that, just days before Thursday’s violence, some 250,000 people gathered at nearly the identical location in Munich, rallying for the “democratic firewall” against the AfD under the slogan “Democracy needs you.”
Verdi was prominently among the organizers supporting this demonstration, which was triggered after Friedrich Merz (CDU), the opposition leader, introduced bills in Parliament to strengthen immigration controls. Merz’s initiative was sharply attacked by the government, with Scholz declaring, “He can’t be trusted” and the SPD parliamentary group leader hysterically claiming that Merz had “opened the gates to hell“. Maintaining the firewall has become the main election message of the government since then.
There should be no doubt in most voters’ minds that these demonstrations are essentially pro-government rallies. An investigation by the German newspaper Die Welt revealed that every single NGO mobilizing the demonstrators had received either direct or indirect funding from government ministries—specifically from the Family Ministry under Lisa Paus (Greens), the Interior Ministry under Nancy Faeser (SPD), or Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s own office. Verdi, which represents workers in the public sector, media, health, and finance is also closely linked to the Social Democratic (SPD) and Green or Left parties. Mobilising for the demonstrations, its website states: “ver.di calls for resistance against the AfD. We stand against the enemies of democracy. We are the firewall”.
The fact that the demonstrations continued this weekend shows the extent of the fear on the pro-establishment side. This fear was blatantly expressed a few weeks ago, by one of the organisers, a spokeswoman for a group called Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies Against the Right): “Never before has the danger been so great that our democratic achievements and thus the basis of our social coexistence could be endangered by new majorities in the Bundestag,” she said.
There were moments of silence for the victims at last this weekend’s demonstrations, but combined with the predictable message that there must be no hate even after Munich. A trade union spokeswoman at the Berlin rally said: “They have the hate, we have the attitude.” Of course, she was not referring to the hatred of the Islamist attacker, but to the alleged hatred of those who would now ‘exploit’ the incident.
It would be wrong to believe that these rallies have no impact. Their aim is to stifle crucial debates on asylum, migration, and Islamism—topics that desperately need open examination. The establishment’s strategy of deflection and moral posturing—showing “attitude” as the activists call it—betrays a deep distrust of voters’ capacity to engage with complex issues. It also reveals a fundamental contempt for ordinary citizens, treating them as potential extremists who must be monitored and managed lest they transform into “crazy racists.” This Sunday’s election will reveal what voters think of all this.