German CDU leader Friedrich Merz vows to toughen migration policy

The leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, has vowed to crackdown on illegal immigration if he becomes chancellor after Bundestag elections next month.

Merz said on Thursday that he would bar people without proper papers from entering Germany, and promised to increase deportations.

His remarks came the day after two people, including a two-year-old boy, were killed and three others injured in a stabbing in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg.

The suspect, who has been arrested, was a former asylum seeker. He was known to local authorities and had been previously admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and reportedly had said over a month ago that he would leave the country voluntarily.

Merz said the attack had "caused great consternation throughout the country", and linked it to other incidents as he laid out his new position — implicitly distancing himself from the governing record of his CDU colleague, former chancellor Angela Merkel.

"I refuse to recognise that the acts of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg are supposed to be the new normal in Germany," he said. "Enough is enough. We are faced with the shambles of an asylum and immigration policy that has been misguided in Germany for 10 years."

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, met the heads of the country's security services on Wednesday evening and said they will "draw the necessary consequences," although he didn't specify what those would be.

Polls show that with just a month to go till February's election, support for Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens, and the liberal pro-business Free Democrats has declined since the three parties' governing "traffic light" coalition collapsed.

Meanwhile, opinion polls show that support has increased for both the CDU and the extreme Alternative for Germany, or AfD.