An asylum seeker from Afghanistan crashed a Mini Cooper into a union demonstration in Munich on Thursday, injuring more than two dozen people and adding to growing tensions around immigration ahead of Germany’s chancellor election next week.
Authorities believe the 10:30 a.m. crash was a deliberate attack by the 24-year-old, said Markus Söder, the governor of Bavaria, the state of which Munich is the capital. Police said the car passed a police cruiser that was accompanying the demonstration and plowed into the crowd. Officers fired one shot while arresting the man.
The crash site was less than a mile from the venue of the Munich Security Conference, which opens tomorrow and attracts high-profile participants and journalists from around the world. The police do not think the crash was connected to the conference.
Germany is reeling from a string of seemingly unrelated attacks carried out by immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East over the last year. Memories are still fresh of a car-ramming attack in December, when a man drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, in central Germany, injuring as many as 300 people and killing six.
Last month, an Afghan immigrant with an apparent mental illness and who had been scheduled for deportation killed a young child and an adult in a knife attack in a Bavarian park.
The leading parties in the chancellor election, set for Feb. 23, have all vowed to crack down on migrants to varying degrees — most notably the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, which sits second in the polls, and the conservative Christian Democrats, who are projected to finish first.
Some political insiders were speculating on Thursday that the attack could further lift the AfD, which has surpassed 20 percent in polls, by focusing voters even more on migration concerns.
There were similar expectations that the January attack in Bavaria would lure more voters to the AfD, a party that has long been shunned by all other parties in parliament and parts of which are classified as extremist by German intelligence. But no such polling bounce materialized.
Allies of the Christian Democrats’ candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said on Thursday that they did not expect him to lose supporters to the AfD in the wake of the attack. They cited Mr. Merz’s decision last month, following the Bavarian knife attack, to push a set of newly restrictive migration members to a vote in parliament.
The move was meant to show voters that Mr. Merz and his party are serious about acting to curtail migration and responding to concerns about public safety. But it sparked outrage in the Bundestag, the federal parliament, and protests around the country, because Mr. Merz effectively broke a decades-long taboo in German politics against working with parties considered to be extreme. That’s because Mr. Merz pursued the measures knowing they could only pass with votes from the AfD.
Mr. Merz succeeded in passing a symbolic measure, but a second vote, on changes to migration law, failed, with several members of Mr. Merz’s party defecting.
Still, some of Mr. Merz’s allies suggested Thursday that the episode had effectively inoculated him and the Christian Democrats against claims of being unresponsive to voters on migration.
The political risks of the attack could be higher for the embattled incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats are polling in third or fourth in surveys.
Mr. Scholz has taken a more measured approach to migration in the campaign. But on Thursday, he offered an aggressive response to the attack that underscored how sensitive the subject of migration — especially from Afghanistan and Syria — has become.
The driver “must be punished and he must leave the country,” said Mr. Scholz, who is struggling to connect with voters and is not expected to be re-elected chancellor, during a campaign stop in Fürth.
Mr. Scholz was set to take part on Thursday evening in a televised debate with the three other leading chancellor candidates: Mr. Merz, Alice Weidel of the AfD and Robert Habeck of the Green Party. Migration was already expected to be a contentious topic, but the attack raised its salience further.
Photographs and videos of the crash site on Thursday showed a severely dented beige Mini Cooper, which witnesses said had been driven into the crowd.
A rescue helicopter and several ambulances were on site to bring victims — at least 28 were injured, two of them severely — to the hospital.
Sandra Demmelhuber, a journalist for Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian public broadcaster, was at the crash site and described a chaotic scene.
“There is a person lying on the street and a young man was led away by the police. People sitting, crying and shaking on the ground,” she wrote on X.
The demonstration had been organized by Verdi, one of Germany’s largest unions, which had called a one-day strike for city workers. About 2,500 people were at the rally when the crash took place.
The police confirmed that the man they apprehended was known for being involved in minor crimes, such as shoplifting and drugs.
The man is believed to have failed in his request for asylum, but had an official status that allowed him to stay in the country at least temporarily, according to Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s state interior minister. Beyond those details, however, he was not publicly identified.
The attack came on the day the trial opened for an Afghan man who is accused of stabbing to death a police officer, and wounding several others, in Mannheim last spring.
After Thursday’s crash, Mr. Söder — whose Christian Social Union, a regional sister party of the Christian Democrats, has governed Bavaria for decades — wasted no time calling for action.
“It was not the first such act,” Mr. Söder said at the site of the crash. “Today I feel compassion for the people, but at the same time I am determined that something must change in Germany and quickly,” he added.