Federal Interior Minister Faeser is appalled by the Brokstedt train attack and the lax handling of the judiciary in the run-up to the perpetrator. That can hardly be surpassed in terms of hypocrisy. After all, the SPD has been the Minister of Justice for many years. However, there was never much to be heard from them when it came to harsher penalties.

“How could it be that such a perpetrator was still here in the country? How could it be that with so many criminal records he was no longer in a correctional facility? And how could it happen that he was released from custody so early?”

Almost everyone asked themselves these questions from Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) after the terrible bloody crime in Brokstedt. And most citizens will also have asked themselves why the Palestinian, who had multiple criminal records and killed two young people for no reason and seriously injured several others, was not deported long ago.

There is nothing wrong with these questions from the Home Secretary. But who is the social democrat actually asking? Who is she expecting an answer from? The fact that asylum seekers with multiple criminal records are still allowed to live here and are tolerated by German taxpayers is not due to the failure of any authorities who have overlooked something. Or overly generous judges.

This is a blatant state failure. There was and is no majority in the German Bundestag for what the citizens consider obvious: that our hospitality must end when it is blatantly abused. Gerhard Schröder put it this way in 1997, when he was not yet chancellor: “We can no longer be so timid about foreign criminals caught. For anyone who abuses our hospitality rights, there is only one option: get out, and quickly.”

“Get out, and quickly?” But the SPD didn’t want to hear about that anymore as soon as it was in government. Ms. Faeser has apparently also forgotten that her party has provided the federal justice minister for 18 years over the past quarter century. As a reminder: They were called Däubler-Gmelin (1998-2009) and Maas, Barley and Lambrecht (2013-2021).

But none of them was interested in harsher penalties or a rigorous deportation practice. Those who demanded otherwise were quickly defamed as xenophobes from the ranks of the Social Democrats, the Greens and a large part of the media, alternately as racists or Nazis.

An asylum seeker with multiple criminal records has lived out his bloodlust. How could it be, how could all this happen? Ms. Faeser should know: Because the welcoming culture in the red-green spectrum always took precedence over the implementation of the rule of law. The SPD and the Greens acted according to the maxim that it would be better to have a few more foreign criminals in the country than to be considered politically “law and order” politicians. With this label one wanted to put the CDU/CSU in the far right corner.

Nancy Faeser seems to want to present herself as a strong home secretary. The assumption that she has the Hessian voters firmly in her sights as a potential SPD top candidate is obvious. But Faeser would be more credible if she gave a clear answer instead of a rhetorical one: The knife murderer was able to strike again because the SPD was too hesitant on the subject of “deportation of criminal asylum seekers” for party political reasons; one could also say too generous. Admitting this would not be easy – but honestly.