This attack is very differentPublished at 20:02 GMT
Damien McGuinness
Berlin correspondent
The angry cries against visiting senior politicians certainly indicate that some people are disapproving of the country’s leadership.
And indeed, the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack changed the political debate about immigration.
The attacker was an asylum seeker with ties to Islamic extremism, but his application was rejected. At the time, Germany was hosting an unprecedented number of refugees and migrants, with 1.5 million people coming from the Middle East in 2015 and 2016.
Although largely welcoming in mainstream society, this attack, and many other immigrant-related terrorist groups, have changed the political debate and contributed to increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants in some parts of society. It became.
Opinion poll numbers for the far-right party AfD have soared, and in 2017 it won a seat in Germany’s parliament for the first time. Again, within hours of the attack, some AfD politicians posted anti-immigrant comments online.
However, this attack is very different. The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who has lived in Germany for about 20 years.
He is not so much anti-immigrant as he is anti-Muslim, and in some cases even appears to support far-right ideology.
German Minister Nancy Feser said it was too early to speculate why the suspect carried out the attack, but “the only thing that can be confirmed” is that the suspect had expressed “Islamophobic” attitudes. Ta.
