The black-clad attackers beat up Matthias Ecke so badly as he put up posters in Dresden that he needed surgery. In Nordhorn, a man threw eggs at a lawmaker then punched him in the face. In Berlin, a pensioner hit a senator on the head with a bag.
Just three of the assaults that German politicians have suffered over the past week as campaigns get underway for European Parliament and district council elections. Tensions have always risen ahead of votes. But something has shifted, say parties and analysts.
Assaults causing physical injury have surged - 22 on politicians so far in 2024, compared with 27 for all of 2023, the Federal Criminal Police Office said this week.
The German “conservative” parties CDU and CSU have been running full on far right populism/extremism over the past two years, especially against the Green party. They are aided by lobby groups representing the majority of large German companies, like the INSM, who ran an antisemitic smear campaign depicting the now minister of foreign affairs Baerbock as “forbidding Moses”. Of course that was not cause for consequences towards this organisation.
Meanwhile the current government of social democrats, (neo-)liberals and greens are running a more and more austerious, authoritarian government that caves in and now supports far right tropes, like demanding inhumane treatment of denied asylum seekers. Now the neoliberals are demanding to implement a model similiar to Britains Rwand model of deporting asylum seekers to an african country. Note that this comes only a few month after an outcry about the fascist afd, the cdu and a fringe group in between organized a meeting with Austrian Neonazis discussing a plan to deport all “non Germans” including German citizens and ethnic Germans with the “wrong” political positions, lgbt and the like, to an African country yet to be conquered for that purpose. Instead of focusing on far right extremism, the social democrat run ministry of interior focuses on some abstract left danger, that is yet to be proven statistically, or running after 70 years old ex terrorists whose last criminal association is more than 20 years ago. Police officers are by the hundreds found in far right chats, sharing hate speech and plotting to overthrow the government, often with consequences only being temporary paid suspension. Last year a bomb attack destroyed an office of the left party and the police dropped the investigations until extensive pressure from the left party, again without any consequences for the police.
The rise of the fascists and far right extremists is in part ignored and in part aided by the parties, whose members are now attacked.