One month ahead of the June 9 European elections, an alarming trend is dominating the political news cycle in Germany: The increasing number of attacks on elected representatives. Over the past week, these attacks have become an almost daily occurrence.
On Thursday, May 2, Essen deputy mayor Rolf Fliss (Greens) was struck in the neck and forehead by three unknown assailants as he left a meeting with some party members. Matthias Ecke (SPD), a Social Democrat MEP, was hospitalized on Friday, May 3, after sustaining injuries to his face while hanging up election signs for the European elections. His four alleged assailants, aged between 17 and 18, have ties to the neo-Nazi scene.
On Tuesday, May 7, the economics minister of the state of Berlin, Franziska Giffey (SPD), the capital city's former mayor, was struck on the head by a 74-year-old man, who had a police record, while visiting a library. On Thursday, two regional MPs from the far-right AfD party, Miguel Klauss and Hans-Jürgen Gossner, were mildly injured by five youths outside the Baden-Württemberg state Parliament in Stuttgart.
These attacks are extremely worrying for two reasons. First, because their number has almost doubled in five years: According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 2,790 crimes against elected representatives or active members of the seven parties represented in the Bundestag were committed in 2023, almost half of which were against Green party members. In 2019, the BKA had recorded 1,420 such crimes. Secondly, because they come as part of a more general trend toward the undermining of German democracy.
Changing times
Four current trials are symptomatic of this: That of Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD's radical wing, charged with publicly uttering a slogan of the Nazi Sturmabteilung ("assault sections") group, the paramilitary militia of Adolf Hitler's national socialist party; as well as those of the 26 "Citizens of the Reich" (Reichsbürger) who were arrested in 2022 while preparing an armed attack on the Bundestag, in the hope of re-establishing the German Empire of 1871.
On June 2, 2019, Germany awoke to the shock of the news that Walter Lübcke, the regional governor of Kassel, had been found dead, killed by a bullet to the head, on his terrace. Two weeks later, a neo-Nazi was arrested. For the first time since the Second World War, a representative of the state was murdered by a far-right militant in Germany.
At the time, many political leaders were concerned that this could lead to an escalation reminiscent of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), where political violence was so normalized that it provided the breeding ground for Nazism. Five years on, the growing number of attacks on elected representatives has reawakened the "specter" of Weimar in public debate.
The comparison obviously has its limits. Yet it should at least have the virtue of being a wake-up call. "A response that each and every one of us can give is quite simple: Voting!" on June 9, said Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a video message on Thursday. Of course, no one can contradict this. However, the answer must also come from the state. Just as it has begun to take its defense policy seriously, Germany needs to break out of another form of naiveté and realize that, politically too, it is experiencing a Zeitenwende ("change of era"). It must therefore at long last actively tackle those within the country who threaten democracy.