On 19 December 2016, in the final shopping days before Christmas a 24-year old Tunisian named Anis Amri hijacked a lorry, killed the Polish driver, and drove the vehicle through a crowded Christmas market by the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s main shopping street. Twelve people were killed in the ensuing carnage and many more injured. After escaping from the lorry Amri then made his escape across Europe. Despite being the most wanted man on the continent he managed first to travel to Holland. Then he managed to enter and travel through France – a country still meant to be on heightened alert during its second year in a state of national emergency. Then Amri travelled to Italy where two policemen in Milan asked to see his identity papers. He reached for a gun and shot one of the Italian police officers before the other officer shot Amri dead. It transpired that Amri – who had pledged allegiance to Isis before the attack – had landed as a migrant in Lampedusa in 2011. Turned down for an Italian residency permit, he was later imprisoned on Sicily for setting fire to a government-provided shelter. In 2015, after leaving prison he entered Germany and registered as an asylum-seeker under at least nine different names. The failure of local German authorities to communicate with each other, added to Europe’s lax external and absent internal borders systems had served Amri well. The same systems had served the shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin less well.

While large-casualty atrocities like this caught the headlines and galvanised the European press for a couple of news cycles, all the time the facts on the ground were changing the continent as a whole. The German authorities recorded an additional 680,000 arrivals into their country in 2016 alone. Such continuing mass immigration, high birth rates among immigrants and low birth rates among native Europeans all ensured that the changes underway would only accelerate in the years ahead. The German people had demonstrated at the polls that politically speaking even Merkel was mortal. But she had helped to alter a continent and change an entire society, with consequences that would play out for generations to come.

16. The feeling that the story has run out

16

The feeling that the story has run out