Germany reintroduced police checks at all of its land borders in September 2024, saying it was cracking down on illegal immigration. The move followed the Solingen terror attacks, in which a Syrian national who had been refused asylum stabbed three people to death at a German street festival. The man, who had ties to the Islamic State group, was convicted and is serving a life sentence.
Spot checks had already been in place along Germany's eastern borders since 2023, a step that led Poland to check Germans travelling the other way. The measures, described as temporary, have been renewed every six months. Germany has justified them by claiming that high levels of irregular migration threaten public security and order.
The controls sit inside the Schengen area, created after France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands signed an agreement in 1985 near the point where Luxembourg, Germany and France meet on the Moselle. The zone now covers 29 countries, and internal passport checks were meant to have ended. Similar internal stops were used by Germany, Denmark and other EU states during the 2015 migration surge, when more than one million asylum seekers reached Europe. EU asylum applications are now at their lowest in five years, while governments face electoral pressure from populist, far-right parties, including in Germany, campaigning against illegal immigration.
On the busy motorway between Luxembourg and Germany, the checkpoints are a daily inconvenience. Last month German police pulled over and inspected a bus carrying Luxembourg social democrats across the bridge to meet their SPD sister party in Saarland. In a joint statement the parties said it could hardly be more symbolic that they were checked at the place where, more than 40 years ago, the foundation was laid for a Europe without internal borders. Ulrich Commerçon, who leads the SPD in the Saarland state parliament, said the hold-up was not merely symbolic and undermined cross-border co-operation, adding that the European ideal is increasingly falling by the wayside.