Europe’s bloody summer
Germany suffered its first jihadi suicide bombing on Sunday when a Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a music festival in Ansbach, injuring 15 people. It was the second suspected Islamist attack in Bavaria in the space of a week: six days earlier, a Pakistani migrant with an axe wounded four people on a train near Würzburg. Islamic State claimed responsibility for both attacks. Over the same period, the country saw two other deadly assaults by Muslim men that were seemingly unrelated to Islamist terrorism: on Friday, a German-iranian 18-year-old man shot nine people dead in Munich; on Sunday, a Syrian asylum seeker killed a pregnant woman with a machete in the southern city of Reutlingen. The string of violent attacks fuelled criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy.
France, still reeling from the recent mass killing in Nice, also fell victim to more Islamist violence this week. On Tuesday, two assailants claiming allegiance to Isis slit the throat of an elderly priest in a church in Normandy ( see page 7).
What the editorials said
When confronted with horrific events like those of recent days, said The Daily Telegraph, the human instinct is to seek “a pattern that can go some way to explaining the seemingly inexplicable”. But we shouldn’t impute too much meaning to the nihilistic acts of “inadequate and sometimes disturbed individuals”. By declaring France to be “at war” with Isis, President François Hollande risks dignifying these attackers’ “pathetic dreams of grandeur”.
It’s important to remember that Europe, compared to other parts of the world, is still very safe, said The Observer. That’s why migrants want to move here. Governments must act calmly to ease public fears, while ensuring there’s no “backlash against foreigners and migrants”. Europe could learn from Israel, which is “under constant threat”, about how to manage today’s security challenges, said The Sunday Times. And it can also look to its own history. In the 1970s, the farleft Baader-meinhof gang tried to destabilise Germany with a string of kidnappings and killings. “If the aim was to provoke an illiberal response, even a police state, it failed. The current wave of killings will fail to change society, too. But the Germans must hold their nerve. Like the rest of us.”
What the commentators said
When it comes to Islamist terrorism, Germany is in a rather different position to other European countries, said Konstantin Richter in The Guardian. Its Muslim population is largely made up of people of Turkish origin who are arguably “less susceptible to Isis propaganda than, say, north Africans in France or Belgium”. And though relations with wider German society have at times been strained, they aren’t “tainted by colonial history”. But last year Germany opened its doors to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria. Despite efforts to integrate these people, many are languishing in refugee centres, “homesick, angry and frustrated”.
It’s all too easy for such individuals to become radicalised, said Shiraz Maher in the New Statesman. With Isis losing ground in the Middle East, the group has stepped up efforts to encourage lone-wolf attacks in the West, telling followers that they are “behind enemy lines”. More random attacks are “inevitable” – and it’s hard to see how to stop them. One step that would help, said Alice Thomson in The Times, is better mental health care. It’s no coincidence that many of the perpetrators of recent Isis-inspired atrocities have had mental health issues.
The lesson from France, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph, is that hard-line counterextremism tactics are not necessarily the answer. Over recent years, the French have acted aggressively to disrupt Islamist groups, “raiding bookshops, seizing computers, closing down networks and the like”. Much good it has done them. The German approach has been more enlightened, said Robert Verkaik in The Independent. By offering sanctuary to so many Muslim refugees last year, Merkel “sent a message to the world that Germany is not at war with Islam”. Critics say the recent attacks show the move was rash, but the asylum seekers responsible for those attacks entered Germany before Merkel announced her open-door policy. In the long run, Merkel’s compassionate approach will leave her country safer. “While France and Belgium are caught in a vicious circle of ever-tougher policing and increasing terror attacks, Germany has the chance to forge a different future.”
What next?
With key elections due in many EU countries over the next year, the spate of terrorist attacks could help reshape politics, says The Observer. In October, Austria reruns its presidential elections, and Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has staked his future on winning a referendum on constitutional reforms. October also sees a referendum in Hungary over whether to accept refugee quotas demanded by Brussels.
In March, Geert Wilders’s anti-eu, anti-islam party is set to become the largest party in the Netherlands. In May, Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Front National, is on track to advance to the second round of presidential elections.