Germany mourns amid AfD poll surge ahead of election

As the far-right party gathered momentum in the run-up to today’s vote, Tom Watling travelled to Munich to gauge the reaction of residents to last week’s suspected terror attack

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A middle-aged woman clutching an emptied cardboard box stands silently over the latest pile of fresh red flowers to be laid on the roadside near Munich’s central station. A child’s pink dress hangs on the railings above, next to an Algerian flag and a doll. Teddy bears sit among placards calling for peace.

It’s just over a week since a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove his white Mini into a crowd of people attending a trade union demonstration. It was the third suspected terror attack in Germany in as many months. More than two dozen were injured. A woman originally from Algeria, who had worked for the German government, and her two-year-old child were killed.

A 19-year-old waitress working at a diner next to where the attack took place says her “heart broke” when she found out a child had been killed. She was at her family home, an hour away, when the attack happened. When she returned three days later, she says, the area was swarming with police. It was then that officials announced the death of the mother and child.

“I never thought that something like this could happen,” she explains, asking not to be named so that she can talk freely about who she will vote for. “Now, every time I’m in the city, it reminds me of the accident, and I think, well, what if something like this would happen now?”

Up the road, a political poster depicting a smiling Freidrich Merz – the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who is expected to become Germany’s next chancellor – has been defaced with an Adolf Hitler moustache. The country goes to the polls today.