Damien McGuinness
Berlin correspondent

The angry shouts at high-ranking
visiting politicians certainly show that some people are blaming the country’s leaders.

And certainly the Berlin
Christmas market attack in 2016 did shift the political debate on migration.

The attacker was an asylum seeker
with links to Islamist extremism whose application had been rejected. At the
time Germany was taking in unprecedented numbers of refugees and migrants — 1.5
million people in 2015 and 2016, mostly from the Middle East.

Mostly there was a feeling of
welcome in mainstream society but this attack, and a number of other terror
arracks linked to migrants, shifted the political debate and contributed to an
increasingly hostile attitude towards migration in some parts of society.

The far-right AfD“s poll numbers
surged and in 2017 the party entered Germany‘s national parliament for the
first time. This time round too, within hours of the attack, some AfD
politicians were posting anti-migrant comments online.

This attack is though very
different. The suspected perpetrator is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, who has
been in Germany for almost 20 years.

He doesn’t appear so much as
anti-migrant, but rather if anything anti-Islam and possible even supportive of
far-Right ideology.

German Minister Nancy Faeser said
it was too early to speculate why the suspect had carried out the attack but
that “the one thing” she could confirm was that he had expressed an
“Islamophobic” stance.