On Thursday morning, an Afghan refugee deliberately plowed a car into a crowd in Munich, motivated by what the police called an “Islamist orientation.” A 2-year-old girl and her mother were killed, and nearly 40 others were injured.
A day later — in a country where migration has been a major election issue — that attack was no longer the biggest news story in town.
German news media, and much of the country’s political leadership, immersed themselves to a larger degree in a blizzard of foreign-policy pronouncements from the Trump administration as Western leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference.
The annual gathering, which ended on Sunday, left many Germans who attended fuming that the Trump team was trying to influence the vote in coming parliamentary elections by publicly lecturing German politicians about blocking a far-right party from government.
German leaders left Munich profoundly worried about the country’s relationship with the United States as the Trump administration appeared to be icing Europe out of substantive discussions on a peace plan for Ukraine, at least for now.
The onslaught of news from the conference vaulted Mr. Trump and his policies squarely into the center of Germany’s final week of campaigning, diverting some of the attention from issues like the string of deadly attacks carried out by immigrants and refugees across the country over the last year.
The main article on the front page of Munich’s largest newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, on Saturday featured a picture of Vice President JD Vance delivering a speech criticizing Europeans that stunned attendees at the conference. “Undiplomatic Announcement,” read the headline.
In the speech, Mr. Vance urged German leaders to allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany to enter the federal government, without mentioning any of the reasons mainstream parties have shunned governing with it, including that some of its members have been convicted of using Nazi slogans.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung front page also included a picture from the attack site, but the accompanying article ran inside the paper. Other German news outlets were filled with stories on the fallout from Mr. Vance’s appearance and other Trump administration moves in Munich.
The coverage signaled a clear shift: Until this weekend, the American president was a preoccupation of many Germans. But he hadn’t really been an issue in the race for chancellor.
He is now.
It is unclear what party, if any, might benefit from the new focus on Mr. Trump. His administration’s actions gave platforms to several leading parties. Those include Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which received what German media called a “campaign gift” from Mr. Vance in his Friday speech.
But they also include the incumbent Social Democrats and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who sit a distant third or fourth in the polls but suddenly had an opportunity to project diplomacy on a global and local stage. The same was true for the poll-leading Christian Democrats and their chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz.
Both Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz spent their time at the Munich conference publicly telling Mr. Trump and his team to stay out of German politics.
“There is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Mr. Merz said on Saturday in response to a Munich panel moderator’s question about plans for peace in Ukraine.
Germans respect America’s elections, he said, “and we expect the U.S. to do the same here.”
The reaction was so strong because of Germany’s “deep historical experiences with fascism,” said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany, who attended the conference. “Vance was a shock to the system,” he said.
But Mr. Sokol cautioned that “it remains to be seen if the speech has an impact on the results of the upcoming election.”
The German campaign has been relatively short, particularly by American standards. The early elections were called after the last governing coalition splintered in November. After a slow holiday start, the contest really roared to life only in January.
Until this weekend, candidates focused largely on migration and on Germany’s stagnant economy. The leading contenders for chancellor, including Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz, have mostly sparred over government spending and borrowing, energy policy and how best to overhaul migration laws to manage the millions of asylum seekers who have entered Germany over the past decade.
The first big shake-up in the race came last month, when an Afghan immigrant who was scheduled to be deported — and who the police said suffered from mental illness — used a knife to kill a toddler in a Bavarian park and a bystander who tried to intervene. The killings came not long after a Saudi immigrant who was working as a doctor in Germany killed six people at a Christas market in Magdeburg by ramming his car into a crowd, and after other knife attacks last year.
Mr. Merz, breaking a decades-old taboo, quickly pushed a set of migration bills to a vote in Parliament, knowing they could pass only with votes from the AfD. Protests ensued across Germany against giving the AfD such an opening, but Mr. Merz emerged unscathed in polls.
Even before the shift in attention to Mr. Trump, the political race had stayed remarkably static. There is, however, potential for a dramatic swing in the final days. A third of Germans have told pollsters they could change their minds before Election Day — either switching parties or choosing not to vote at all.
The AfD sits in second place in polls with just over 20 percent support, well behind the Christian Democrats. It gained a few points of support in December, a trend that started before the Christmas market attack, but has largely flatlined in the new year. Recent polls showed it roughly back to the vote share it had a year ago, notwithstanding the high-profile endorsement it recently got from Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire adviser.
It will take a few days for polls to take the first measure of effects from the latest attack in Munich and the outcry at the Munich conference.
Still, it was clear that the Trump news at the conference had spilled immediately into German politics. Top German political figures rewrote their speeches or panel remarks to include pointed rebuttal to Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump. The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, was alone in celebrating Mr. Vance’s remarks and the Trump administration.
Before diving into his plans for expanded government borrowing and military spending, Mr. Scholz rebuked Mr. Vance for telling Europeans “there is no room for firewalls” in their politics, a reference to mainstream parties shunning the AfD. “We will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy,” the chancellor said.
He added, “That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies.”
The candidate currently leading the race, Mr. Merz, used his panel appearance on Saturday to defend German restrictions on hate speech in pushing back against Mr. Vance, who said it was time for Europeans to stop policing speech. He also went out of his way to ding Mr. Trump’s trade policies, including threats of new tariffs on Europe.
Mr. Merz tried to cast himself as a potential future counterweight to Mr. Trump in Europe, a message that seemed to be aimed as much at German voters as it was to the diplomats at the conference.
“I fully agree with all those who are demanding more leadership from Germany,” Mr. Merz said. “And I am willing to do that.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.