‘Fascist methods’, the judge ruled South German Zeitung in an editorial about the attack on SPD politician Matthias Ecke. “Sounds like Weimar,” wrote the usually conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The way in which Ecke was attacked by a gang of young men is an “SA way”, according to the same newspaper, referring to Hitler’s ‘Sturmabteilung’ in the brown uniform, which was intended to intimidate political opponents.
There is great horror in Germany about the attack on Ecke. The MEP was pasting posters in Dresden on Friday evening when he was beaten up by a group of men to such an extent that he broke his cheekbone and eye socket. Four young men aged seventeen and eighteen have been arrested, the police assume a political motive.
The robbery of Ecke is not the first of its kind, but it is a low point for the time being. Earlier that evening, a Greens campaign worker was attacked by the same group in Dresden. In the same week, members of the Greens and Volt were attacked in the eastern cities of Chemnitz, Leipzig and Zwickau.
‘Tense atmosphere’
The Greens announced that their employees in Saxony, where the four cities are located, will no longer go out alone and only during daylight. The CDU also only sends campaign workers out in larger groups in some places. Since the start of the European election campaign, more than fifty reports of politically motivated violations have been made in Saxony alone, including vandalized election posters. Police figures in the state also show that mayors and local administrators are increasingly being attacked, verbally or physically, or at least reporting them more often. Across Germany, 2,790 attacks on politicians were counted last year, almost double the number in 2019.
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Sociologist Axel Salheiser of the ‘Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft Jena’ conducts research into the threat to local politicians. For a study, he interviewed mayors and other local administrators in the state of Thuringia, which borders Saxony. On average, they feel more threatened than a few years ago, in most cases due to verbal violence. For example, the Prime Minister of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke) wrote on his website in February that a group of men chanted during one of his performances: ‘Schau schau – du dumme Sau! We are proud of our Frau‘ (Look, look, you stupid pig! We’re raping your wife now).
“The atmosphere is very tense at the moment because of the local elections soon and the state elections in September,” said Salheiser. A new state parliament will be elected in the states of Saxony and Thuringia on September 1, with the far-right AfD leading in the polls in both states. The Minister of the Interior of Saxony, Armin Schuster (CDU), said to the South German Zeitung assuming that the coming election period will be more precarious than usual.
sociologistAxel Salheiser The AfD pretends to stand up against a ‘corrupt elite’. Directors are sometimes called ‘traitors to the people’
“Extreme enemy images are being created,” says Salheiser. “The AfD is acting particularly aggressively in the east. The party pretends to stand up against a ‘corrupt elite’. Words like ‘traitor to the people’, as administrators are sometimes called, or the narrative of ‘resistance against the system’ makes all means seem legitimized.” Many East Germans are proud of their resistance to the GDR regime in the late 1980s – and many AfD supporters in the eastern states mention East German history when explaining why they must ‘revolt’ now.
Greens most often targeted
“It appears that Ecke was targeted because he is a representative of his party, the Social Democrats,” says Salheiser. The violence against politicians is not an isolated incident, but according to Salheiser it fits into a worrying trend: nationally there is an increase in violence against minorities. A victim support association noted a 15 percent increase in far-right violence in 2022, aimed at people of color or LGBTI people. The Saxony police recorded a 23 percent increase in racist and anti-Semitic violence for the year 2023.
Violence against politicians is most often directed against Greens. According to preliminary figures, they were targeted more than 1,200 times in 2023. In second place are AfD politicians, who reported it almost five hundred times. For example, in August last year, AfD politician Beatrix von Storch was smeared with dog feces.
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The Saxony government now wants to take the lead in punishing violence against and threatening politicians extra severely. In Saxony, more police will also take to the streets at places where there are campaign stands. To the local newspaper, the Saxon ZeitungMinister Schuster said that the “coarsening, which has mainly arisen on the right side of the political spectrum – among members and sympathizers – has reached alarming proportions.”
Schuster also called for moderation: “The most dangerous thing that can happen now is that violence on both sides escalates further, which will be repaid in kind.” Two young women and a man destroyed an AfD campaign stand in Dresden on Saturday afternoon. The AfD member was not injured.
Sociologist Salheiser believes it is important to point out the many significant differences between the Weimar Republic, where murder and intimidation of politicians was the order of the day, and Germany in 2024. “Not to mention the scale – the number of political murders at the time – that violence was also publicly encouraged or at least accepted. Now the violence is condemned by almost everyone.”
Moreover, Salheiser notes, overly apocalyptic assessments of the state of democracy are grist to the mill of the far right. “After all, that democracy would be at an end, that nothing would work anymore, is also the story of the extreme right. And that is not the case: there is great dissatisfaction, yes, but a large majority does not want another, authoritarian system.”
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