All of Europe is struggling with political violence—but Germany most of all.
This is why Germans today are so deeply distressed about the shocking spate of violence against candidates and campaign volunteers involved in the run-up to the EU-wide European Parliament elections on June 6 to 9. And there is some evidence that the phenomenon, while most intense and sustained in Germany, is not confined to the Federal Republic. In Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico was the victim of an assassination attempt on May 15. France, Poland, the Netherlands, and other countries have also seen violence against politicos surge—although its perpetrators are not generally as closely associated with the extreme-right scene as in Germany.
The Dutch political historian Ido de Haan underscores that the far right’s ascendance across Europe is at the root of the problem: “The larger context for this violence is mostly the hard right’s ascendance across Europe,” he told Foreign Policy. He pointed out that the far right leads or participates in governments in Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, and most recently the Netherlands, too. The far-right parties, including in Germany, are expected to score particularly well in the EU vote, and headline-grabbing attacks could play into their court, he said.
Indeed, Germany appears to be the epicenter of the phenomenon—and female personnel are particularly vulnerable. On May 4, a prominent Social Democrat, Matthias Ecke, was hanging posters in Dresden when attacked by four teenagers, at least one a known right-wing radical, and badly beaten, landing him in the hospital with broken bones. That week, a female Green party campaign worker in the same city was assaulted. In Berlin on May 7, a former mayor, Social Democrat Franziska Giffey, was assailed and hurt. In 2023, aggressive behavior toward political figures and officials in Germany surged: 3,691 incidents, 80 of them involving physical violence. The numbers show that the lion’s share of perpetrators are extreme rightists. The party bearing the overwhelming brunt of abuse: the Greens.
The hard right has long seen leftists as its primary political enemy, but several years running now it is the Greens party—with its high-profile climate policies and progressive identity politics—that presents an oversized target. The far right brands the environmentalists as elitist, cosmopolitan, and more concerned about the natural world than the human beings living in it. They are pigeonholed as the party that wants to ban and outlaw things like combustion-engine automobiles, domestic flights, and new oil and gas heating systems. But all of the democratic parties are objects of hate for the hard right, and they are singled out as such with purpose and strategic calculation.
“In Germany,” de Haan said, “these cases and others constitute interference in the electoral processes,” which he argued is, for the moment at least, unique in Europe. The Greens and other leftist parties are targeted in an indirectly organized, tactical effort to obstruct their campaigns and undermine democracy, he said. “The extreme right’s aim is to deny the legitimacy of democratic processes. It wants to assert itself as the most visible and consequential political force prepared to stand up and do something dramatic about the system’s perceived failings.”
“These attacks are aimed at destroying the very basis of democracy,” agreed the left-liberal daily Tageszeitung, “at the political commitment of people in their city and community. If everyone is too afraid to run for office, the perpetrators will have won.”
In contrast, the Fico assassination attempt in Slovakia appears to be more similar to past political violence in Slovakia carried out by underworld protagonists or political enemies. The assailant was a lone perpetrator, frustrated with government policies and thus appears “closely related to the specific conditions in Slovakia,” explained Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg. Therre is a “supercharged polarization, a public debate full of hate speech, ubiquitous accusations of corruption and illegitimacy against political opponents, and the big conflict over Slovakia’s geopolitical position: West or East,” Brunnbauer told Foreign Policy.
Experts in Germany say the prominence and expansion of political violence has everything to do with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) itself, an extremist party with convictions that often dovetail with those of full-fledged neo-Nazis, the likes of whom are at home within its ranks. “The AfD is a party with violence in its DNA,” said Heike Kleffner, an author of several books on the German right and head of a counseling center for victims of right-wing violence. “Its language, proclamations, and accusations condone and even call for violence against its political foes,” she said.
So incendiary is the party that several AfD branches in eastern Germany and the national AfD youth section are the subject of German intelligence service observation. The AfD’s politics are so much more radical than those of its far-right peers in the European Parliament’s Identity and Democracy group, an alliance of populist right-wing parties that includes Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally, that the alliance expelled the AfD from its ranks on May 21. A new German study found that 28 AfD members serving in German legislatures had been convicted of violence-related crimes, including verbal violence and incitement to hatred.
Kleffner pointed out that right-wing attacks against democratic officials are not new, although their scope has expanded. In 2019, Walter Lübcke, a Christian Democrat politician in Hesse, was gunned down by a neo-Nazi after expressing sympathy with refugees. In 2015, the liberal-minded then-candidate for mayor of Cologne was stabbed in the throat while campaigning.
In response, the AfD denies that it has anything to do with street violence. And it points out that it is also the victim of political violence. On May 22, an AfD politico, Mario Kumpf, was punched in the face at a supermarket in Saxony. Most recently, on June 5, another local AfD official was attacked with a knife in Mannheim, a city in western Germany. But neither the AfD’s number of victims nor the severity of their injuries is on par with those of the democratic parties—and the attacks are not part of a larger political strategy.
The threat of injury has already impacted Germany’s political culture. Candidates and campaigners travel in groups. Party insiders say that they are finding it harder to get new people to run for office.
“No one can say what the threshold is at which democracy tips over,” Holger Münch, head of Germany’s federal investigative police agency, told the German media. “But when 10 percent of office and mandate holders say they are considering quitting because of the hostility and another almost 10 percent say they no longer want to run for office again because of the hostility, this is clearly too high.”
The spike in violence and the dramatic headlines have renewed calls for police departments to do more, and even for the state to ban the AfD. The German government passed a Democracy Promotion Act that would finance initiatives that promote “diversity, tolerance, and democracy” with around 200 million euros a year.
Historians such as Brunnbauer say that the violence on the German political scene is nothing like the pandemonium that raged in Weimar Germany. But others point out that then, as now, the hard right utilized violence to achieve political goals. The hate speech, injunctions to take action, and demonization of political opponents jacks up the animosity that like-minded toughs dole out in fists and clubbings on the street.
“The consensus that existed in the old Federal Republic that [political violence] is unacceptable under penalty of political ostracism has been shattered,” opined the Tageszeitung. More violence could shatter the new normal, delivering democracy in Germany a blow that may not equate with the conditions of Weimar Germany but which looks enough like them to set off alarm bells.
Energy News Beat