Germany has, once again, been rattled by a terror attack. This Thursday the target was a protest rally that was organised by a trade union. The authorities revealed that a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan had tailed the protest march with his car before speeding up and ramming into the crowd.

According to current reports at least 30 people were injured. Fortunately, there are no reports of deaths yet. The attacker had reportedly posted Islamist content on social media prior to the attack.

It is a perverse and horrible fact of life that in Germany at the moment, before the blood spilled in a terror attack has even dried, the conversation moves onto what it means for the polls. The country is electing a new Bundestag in 10 days and immigration has become one of the most important issues dominating the debate. Not the usual boring old topics of tax reform, the pension system, energy investment, or how to improve the nation’s notoriously dysfunctional rail system. No, what’s on top of everyone’s mind is how to stop the imported terror.

The tragic events in Munich came less than two months after Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi national, had rammed a car into a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, killing six and injuring 299. Earlier that summer, the 26-year-old Syrian national Issa al Hassan had committed a mass stabbing at a diversity festival in the western German city of Solingen, which resulted in three deaths and eight injuries. The Islamist terror organisation Islamic State took credit for the attack.

Public outrage and the demand for action is strong. According to a recent poll, 68% of Germans say that the country should accept fewer refugees. Some 57% believe that the government should reject migrants who arrive at the border without valid travel documents, while 75% of Germans reported in another poll that they do not believe the current government was doing enough to limit irregular migration.

There is a theoretical political majority to carry out this popular will in parliament: the two parties that are most critical of immigration, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), currently command a combined majority. Meanwhile, the two parties that form the acting government, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens, are supported by less than 30% of voters. Many feel that the two Left-of-centre parties lack a sense of urgency in the face of Islamist terror.

But the two governing parties’ wrath has been directed instead at CDU/CSU candidate for Chancellor Friedrich Merz after he led an effort in the Bundestag in late January to pass a bill that would have limited migration to Germany. Merz had previously said that he did not seek the AfD’s support for the bill in order to keep up his self-imposed “firewall” against any collaboration with the Right-wing opposition party. But in the end almost all AfD members voted for the bill while the SPD and Greens did not.

Instead, the latter two called for mass rallies against the Christian Democrats’ violation of the taboo to accept votes from the AfD. Hundreds of thousands of Germans heeded the call, and the CDU’s party headquarters in Hannover were briefly stormed and occupied by Leftist activists.

But as polls reveal, such militant protests by Left-wing activists are the vocal cry of a diminishing minority while far more Germans desperately long for an end to the terror and a return to what they feel are reasonable immigration controls. As terror attacks become more common, fewer Germans will insist that keeping up a firewall against the AfD is the most pressing task.

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Gregor Baszak is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The American Conservative, The Bellows, Cicero, Platypus Review, Return, Sublation, and elsewhere.

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