An SPD candidate for the European elections in June was attacked and seriously injured in Dresden on Friday evening while putting up campaign posters. Matthias Ecke, who has been in the European Parliament since 2022 and is number 10 on the list for the SPD, was so abused by four masked men that he was hospitalized with broken bones. The SPD in Saxony has confirmed that Ecke required surgery.
A little further away, a Greens campaign worker who was also putting up posters was also attacked on the same evening. The 28-year-old man was reportedly kicked and punched. He was able to go home after treatment by emergency services.
The police assume that the two robberies were committed by the same group of perpetrators. According to witnesses, German media reports, the perpetrators seemed to come from the extreme right – often recognizable in Germany by clothing and hairstyles. One of the perpetrators turned himself in to the police on Saturday night, in the presence of his mother. The seventeen-year-old boy is from Dresden.
‘New dimension of violence’
Germany reacted with horror to the violence. “A new dimension of anti-democratic violence,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) called the robberies. The Minister of the Interior in Saxony, Armin Schuster (CDU), said that while these types of attacks are not new, the “intensity” of the violence is, as is the frequency. According to the Saxon ministry, more than fifty politically motivated crimes were reported in the first week of the European election campaign. In Zwickau, Saxony, a Greens campaign team was threatened last week and forced to pack up the poster again. Similar incidents occurred in Freiberg and Chemnitz, Saxony.
More than fifty politically motivated crimes have already been reported in Saxony in the first week of the European election campaign
Progressive politicians are more often the target of violence and intimidation. On Thursday evening, a Greens politician and deputy mayor in Essen was punched in the face. Last week, the car of Greens politician and Vice President of the Bundestag Katrin Göring-Eckardt was blocked for 45 minutes after a campaign rally in Barnim in Brandenburg and surrounded by a group of people who hit the car in which Göring-Eckhardt was sitting. In January, a group of angry citizens prevented a ferry carrying Economy Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens) from docking. In February, an arson attack was carried out on the house of a Thuringian SPD politician who had organized a demonstration against the extreme right.
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“Democracy is threatened by this,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said on Saturday afternoon. The aggression has something to do with mood-mongering in some speeches, according to Scholz. The SPD in Saxony explicitly pointed to the radical right AfD. This is “what the AfD has sown,” the chairmen of the SPD in Saxony wrote in a statement. Some AfD voters see “us as democrats […]as outlaws,” said the chairmen. Elections will be held in Saxony and Thuringia in September, and the AfD is leading in the polls in both states.
In response to the violence, demonstrations were held in Berlin and Dresden on Sunday evening against the attacks and against the extreme right.
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