“The danger is real and higher than it has been for a long time”

The background noise never went away, but for a long time it could only be heard in the background. Background noise, that’s what the constitutional protection officers and police officers mean: the Islamists who have never stopped making the worst plans. But for a relatively long time there were only relatively few entries in the statistics of carried out or planned attacks. The phenomenon appeared to be losing significance compared to the peak period between 2015 and 2017 with devastating attacks in Paris, Nice, Brussels and Berlin. But recently the numbers have been going up again; an Islamist shot two Swedish football fans in Brussels in October, and an assassin stabbed a German in Paris last weekend. And in Germany there are a striking number of arrests.