‘These are Merkel’s dead’: Christmas market massacre hands German Chancellor’s critics a line of attack

German Chancellor Angela Merkel got an early taste of the kind of reception she can expect from her populist opponents after a truck careened into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people in what her government said was probably a terror attack.

“These are Merkel’s dead,” Marcus Pretzell, chairman of the Alternative for Germany party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, posted on Twitter, eliciting a chorus of rebuttals. A vice-chairman of the Social Democrats, Ralf Stegner, called the comment “ unbelievable and disgusting.”

The response from the anti-immigration party that’s polling in third place nationally underscores the pressure on the German leader to calm a jittery nation as investigators seek to piece together the background to the presumed attack in the capital.

Even if it turns out to be Islamic terrorism, with the attack already having been claimed by the Islamic State group, it’s hard to predict what the consequences might be for the chancellor, according to Daniel Hamilton, executive director of the Centre for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

“Germany hasn’t had an attack like this that’s killed a lot of people in a long time, so clearly there will be pressure on her,” Hamilton said by phone. “But there will also be a sense that Europeans are in this together, that it’s a common threat.”