New anti-terrorist raid across the Rhine. Three suspected members of Hamas were arrested this Wednesday, October 1 in Berlin, announced the German federal prosecutor’s office. They are suspected of having acquired weapons intended for “deadly attacks targeting Israeli or Jewish establishments in Germany”indicates AFP. During the arrests, investigators seized “an AK-47 assault rifle, several pistols and a large quantity of ammunition”specified the prosecution, which considers the suspects as “foreign operators” of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
Germany has been rocked by several Islamist-motivated attacks and planned attacks in recent months. At the end of December 2024, the federal prosecutor’s office had already announced the indictment of three young suspected jihadists in the southwest of the country, including two German-Lebanese brothers aged 15 and 20 suspected of preparing an attack inspired by the Islamic State. A third suspect, German-Turkish and aged 22, was also arrested. The searches also made it possible to discover an assault rifle, knives, telephones and paramilitary equipment.
A few weeks earlier, at the end of October, German security services had foiled a plan targeting the Israeli embassy in Berlin, attributed to a Libyan suspected of links with Daesh. At the end of August 2024, a Syrian killed three people during a knife attack claimed by the terrorist organization during a party in Solingen.
Tragedies with political consequences
More isolated events have also devastated the country. Like in Munich in February, where a two-year-old girl and her 37-year-old mother died of their injuries after a car-ramming attack. The author, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, deliberately rushed into a crowd of demonstrators, shouting “Allah Akbar” at the time of his arrest. He had seen his asylum request rejected, but remained in the country thanks to a stable job as a security guard.
At the beginning of July, a young man from Syria, armed with an ax and a hammer, attacked several people on a German TGV which linked Hamburg to Vienna. In May, a man injured at least five people, three of them seriously, in the western German city of Bielefeld with a knife and sword.
So many tragedies which contributed to the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The anti-immigration party achieved a spectacular breakthrough in mid-September in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany, where it tripled its score in the local elections. More broadly, Alice Weidel’s party is riding a general feeling of fed up. According to a YouGov poll published in May, almost one in three Germans (31%) say they would leave “without a doubt” the country if nothing prevented him from doing so on a professional, financial or personal level. An additional 27% say they are ” probably “ Or “very likely” ready to go.
Conversely, only 37% of German respondents said they would stay in their country, even if given the opportunity to move. Migration (61%) and the cost of living (41%) are among the main reasons for this frustration. More than a third of respondents say they are thinking about emigration more often in recent months. The uneasiness is particularly strong among voters of the FDP (liberal democrat) and the AfD, who say they have been abandoned by the government. Nearly 80% of AfD supporters would leave Germany if given the chance.
