Recent assaults spark national debate over Germany’s increasingly raw political climate, with some seeing echoes of its dark history.
One politician ruthlessly beaten while hanging campaign posters. Another assaulted in a public library. Yet another, pushed and spat on by suspects who were part of a group of people allegedly calling out “Heil Hitler.”
A string of violent attacks on politicians in Germany — including a brutal assault on a member of the European Parliament in Dresden — has shaken many and sparked a national debate over the increasingly raw political climate in the country, with some drawing comparisons to the kind of political violence that accompanied the rise of the Nazis.
Recent attacks on politicians are “reminiscent of the darkest chapter in German history,” said Hendrik Wüst, the conservative premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, in an interview on German public television.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Additional attacks this week — including one on the former mayor of Berlin, SPD politician Franziska Giffey, assaulted in a public library by a man who struck her from behind on the head with a “bag filled with hard contents,” according to police — further raised alarm across the country.
The recent spate of attacks left politicians vowing action to reign in violence directed at political party representatives.
On Tuesday evening, Faeser met with ministers from German states to discuss measures — including sharpening legal penalties for attacks on politicians — to curb the violence.
Many Germans saw the 2019 murder of Walter Lübcke, a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician who had supported Angela Merkel’s welcoming of refugees, by a neo-Nazi as a somber turning point the country’s postwar history, marking the first time a politician was assassinated by a far-right extremist in Germany since World War II.
German police said at least one of the attackers on EU lawmaker Ecke in Dresden appeared to have been influenced by a right-wing extremist ideology.
That was evident when Jörg Urban, the chairman of the AfD in Saxony, condemned the attack on Ecke — but then appeared to blame the SPD.
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