On Thursday morning around 10:30 a.m., a driver injured 28 people, some of them seriously, when he drove into a crowd in the center of Munich. The victims, including several children, were taking part in a union demonstration during a strike with public sector workers. Our thoughts are with the injured strikers.
The police have announced that the perpetrator was a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan. Allegedly, he was under a deportation order. Yet the motive is still completely unclear — it could have been a politically motivated attack, a killing spree without a political motive, an attempted suicide, or even an anti-union attack.
What is clear, however, is that immediately after the attack, politicians and the media began making racist demands for tougher measures against immigrants. At a press conference, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder from the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) said something has to change in Germany, “and quickly.” He speculated about possible connections to the knife attack in Aschaffenburg (another town in Bavaria) in late January. His intention was to stir up racist resentment at the expense of the striking workers who had just been attacked. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, both Social Democrats, also called for more deportations.
The only thing that can help us deal with the shock and push back against all this racist hate speech is solidarity and organizing. The leadership of the service sector union ver.di ended the rally after the incident and sent the workers home. It took a long time before anything was heard from ver.di headquarters.
Fortunately, a meeting point was set up in a nearby venue where workers could come together and process what had happened together. This only happened after the union leaders had already sent most of their members home. For hours after the attack, colleagues exchanged ideas, consoled each other, and also expressed their rejection of the the racist instrumentalization of their suffering.
A demonstration has been planned for tonight to publicly push back against racist agitation. Since there are plans for right-wing protests as well, it is all the more important to stand together. Not only left-wing organizations, but all trade unions should join this protest, in order to mourn together and to express a clear response: we will not allow ourselves to be divided into immigrant and non-immigrant workers! We will not go along with the calls for more deportations by parties from across the political spectrum. Immigrant were part of the strike — and they are already being targeted by the right-wing press and the Far Right.
Leonie Lieb — a striking midwife from a hospital, and also an independent socialist candidate in the upcoming elections — told Klasse Gegen Klasse:
The media and politicians are using the attack against our strike to stir up racism. We won’t put up with that. We need an independent investigation, led by the trade unions. Instead of calling off tomorrow’s strike, ver.di must take to the streets with even greater force tomorrow, to defend our strike and speak up against racism.
First published in German on February 13 on Klasse Gegen Klasse.
Translation: Marco Helmbrecht and Nathaniel Flakin