A series of attacks on German officials and politicians has raised new concerns about political violence and the collapse of civility ahead of several critical elections this year, including in three states where the far-right Alternative for Germany party could make significant gains.
In the latest attack, on Friday afternoon, four people attacked a prominent Social Democratic politician who was hanging campaign posters in Dresden, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and an eye socket that required emergency surgery.
The civil servant Matthias Ecke is running for re-election to the European Parliament.
That afternoon, a Green Party activist, whose name has not been revealed, was attacked in the same residential neighborhood by what police believe were the same group of people. A day earlier, on Thursday, Rolf Fliss, deputy mayor of the city of Essen, 300 miles to the west, was punched in the face by a group of men with whom he had been having what he initially characterized as an “exchange.” friendly”.
The violent attack on Ecke provoked a harsh response from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, himself a social democrat, in Berlin on Saturday.
“Democracy is threatened by these kinds of things, so accepting them with a shrug is never an option,” Scholz said. “We are not going to accept it and we, the decent and reasonable ones, are the majority” in Germany, he added.
Later on Sunday, thousands of people protested against the violence in Berlin and Dresden. At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, politicians from the main parties and members of civil society gave speeches denouncing the attacks.
On Tuesday afternoon, the interior ministers of Germany’s 16 federal states, as well as federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, will meet to discuss security concerns following the attacks.
Police linked four teenagers to the attack on Mr. Ecke. On Saturday, a 17-year-old boy walked into a Dresden police station, accompanied by his mother, and admitted his role in the attack on the politician, police said.
On Sunday, police had raided the homes of three other people, all aged 17 or 18, believed to have been involved in the attack. The Dresden prosecutor claimed on Monday that at least one of them had links to far-right ideology.
Recent attacks on political figures began gaining national attention last September, when a man threw a rock at Green Party leaders at a campaign event in Bavaria.
A mob prevented Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor and prominent Green politician, from disembarking from a ferry in January. More recently, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, another senior Green Party politician and vice president of Parliament, was blocked as she left an event when 40 to 50 protesters surrounded her car.
While most of the victims have been members of the ruling Green and Social Democratic parties, Alternative for Germany, known by its German acronym AfD, has also been a target.
According to the party, vandals attacked a stall containing AfD election material in Dresden on Saturday. A 54-year-old man manning the stall was uninjured.
“The situation has been reaching a critical point for some time now,” says Andrea Römmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin.
According to preliminary government figures, 2,790 attacks (physical, verbal or other threats) against political representatives were registered with the police in 2023, approximately double those registered in 2019.
Some experts and rival parties point to the far right and the AfD, saying they have often used inflammatory language aimed at mainstream politicians. In 2017, when the AfD first entered federal parliament, Alexander Gauland, then a leading candidate, promised on election night that “we will go after them,” in an apparent reference to the ruling coalition.
“I would call it affective polarization: It means that one no longer responds to the opponent’s factual argument, but rather fundamentally delegitimizes him and marks him as an enemy,” said Johannes Hillje, a political scientist who studies political communication.
In a statement issued over the weekend, the Social Democratic Party of the state of Saxony, where Dresden is the capital, called the attack an “unequivocal alarm signal.”
“Violent action and intimidation of Democrats are tools of fascists.” said state party bosses Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel.
Hillje said the problem lies not only in the growing extremes of Germany’s political landscape but also in the verbal attacks of centrist and mainstream politicians, especially towards the Greens.
“The dangerous thing is that democratic forces have adopted right-wing populist stylistic resources and have therefore promoted a discourse that is not in the spirit of democracy,” Hillje said. “They are cutting the branch they are sitting on.”
The recent attacks are reminiscent of the highest-profile political assassination in Germany in recent years, when Walter Lübcke, a conservative lawmaker and supporter of Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy, was shot dead by a neo-Nazi in June 2019. Believed to be Germany’s first political assassination since the end of World War II, Mr. Lübke’s death has sparked public soul-searching.
But as shocking as that crime was, it was meticulously directed and planned, and the killer had a police record and was a known and violent neo-Nazi. The recent attacks appear more opportunistic, but have still provoked a strong response.
“The series of attacks by thugs on campaign teams of democratic parties are an attack on the foundations of our democracy,” said Homann and Michel of the Saxony Social Democrats.