"An attack on our society": Merz responds to Berlin Pride attack
The Chancellor has promised the perpetrator will face the full force of the law, but his words land in a country where queer people were already asking hard questions about how much protection they can count on.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has condemned the deadly attack on Berlin's Christopher Street Day celebrations as an attack on German society itself, promising that the killing of one person and the injuring of sixteen others in Tiergarten park on Saturday night will be investigated and pursued with the utmost severity.
"What a heinous crime in Berlin," Merz wrote on X on Sunday morning, hours after a van was driven into a crowd near the closing party of one of Europe's largest Pride events. "Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world celebrated peacefully at Christopher Street Day. They wanted us to treat one another with kindness and tolerance."
"We are open and freedom-loving, and we will preserve and defend that," the Chancellor continued. "My thoughts are with the victims and their families. I wish the injured a swift recovery and thank all emergency responders."
A government spokesman confirmed that Merz is in close contact with Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and is being continuously briefed by the security authorities as the manhunt for the suspect continues. Dobrindt himself did not soften his language. "This cowardly, despicable attack on people peacefully celebrating has shaken me to the core," he said. "My thoughts are with the victims, their families and everyone who had to witness this act."
Berlin's mayor Kai Wegner, whose city had deployed more than 2,200 police officers to protect the parade and its surrounding events, described what happened as an attack on a free and cosmopolitan society, and said a rally for a tolerant and peaceful Berlin had been assaulted in the most brutal way imaginable, adding that he had full confidence in the police working around the clock on the investigation.
The words from the very top of German politics are unambiguous, and they matter. But for many in Germany's queer community, they will sit uneasily alongside the recent record. It was only last summer that the rainbow flag was banned from flying over the Bundestag for Pride, a decision that drew protests outside the Reichstag, and Merz himself faced criticism, including from the LGBTQ+ association within his own Christian Democrats, after remarking that the parliament building was not a circus tent. Federal police, meanwhile, have recorded an almost tenfold rise in reported queerphobic hate crimes since 2010, with campaigners warning that most incidents never make it into the statistics at all.
That is the backdrop against which Saturday night's horror unfolded, and it is why the Chancellor's promise to preserve and defend an open and freedom-loving Germany will be measured not by the eloquence of a post on X but by what follows. Christopher Street Day exists because visibility has never been given freely to queer people; it has been marched for, danced for and, this weekend in Berlin, died for.
The community Merz addressed on Sunday will accept his sympathy, because grief needs all the company it can find. What it will be watching for now is whether kindness and tolerance, the values he says the marchers stood for, are defended with the same severity he has promised for the investigation.
This story is developing and will be updated. The manhunt for the suspect named by police as Abdul B. continues; the public are urged not to approach him and to share any information with Berlin police.
