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It’s a tightrope walk between security and the desire to remain “close” as a politician: While the current security breach around Chancellor Scholz was apparently harmless, other cases had serious consequences.
The Federal Criminal Police Office is responsible for protecting federal politicians. Prominent and high-ranking politicians such as Chancellor Olaf Scholz are accompanied in public by bodyguards. But even they cannot prevent every unplanned approach, as the current incident with Scholz at Frankfurt Airport shows. There, a man managed to rush towards the chancellor in the security area and hug him.
According to his spokesman, Scholz “never felt threatened”. But he also admits that bad things could have happened.
Attacks by the mentally ill in the election campaign
In fact, in recent history in Germany there have been two public attacks on prominent federal politicians with serious consequences: In 1990, after an election campaign event, a mentally ill man shot the then Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, in a restaurant in Oppenau, Baden. The CDU politician was seriously injured and has been in a wheelchair ever since.
In the same year, the then SPD top candidate Oskar Lafontaine was seriously injured by a knife attack after a campaign speech in the Cologne-Mülheim town hall. The attacker who hit him near the carotid artery was mentally ill.
The first appearance of the CDU politician Schäuble after the attack in 1990. A man shot him at an election campaign event.
Local politicians mostly without special protection
Unlike high-ranking federal or state politicians, local politicians are not usually given special protection when they appear in public. Many of them complain that they are increasingly becoming the target of threats or even violence. The most prominent example here was the current Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker. In 2015, during the election campaign at a weekly market, she was attacked with a knife by a right-wing extremist and critically injured.
As the city’s head of social affairs at the time, Reker was responsible for the accommodation of refugees. The perpetrator wanted to send a signal against refugee policy. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2016 for attempted murder.
In 2019, a right-wing extremist shot the Kassel district president Walter Lübcke. However, the murder did not happen during a public appearance, but at night in Lübcke’s house.
A slap in the face for Schröder, throwing eggs on cabbage
Other cases made headlines, but had no serious consequences for the politicians concerned. In 2004, for example, the then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was slapped at an event in Mannheim by an unemployed man.
And in 1991 in Halle (Saale), the long-serving Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to take action himself against demonstrators who had thrown eggs, tomatoes and bags of paint at him – employees and the barriers were able to stop him.
The egg throwing was visibly annoying for Kohl, but had no serious consequences for him.
Merkel and Putin target of Femen activists
Political activists and demonstrators also repeatedly manage to break through security barriers in order to make it onto the political stage with their concerns. In 2021, a Thuringian known as a “lateral thinker” captured the microphone of the CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet at an election campaign event in Erfurt. In 2019, the then Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn was surprised in Schleswig-Holstein by two half-naked Femen activists protesting against a study on abortions.
Long-serving Chancellor Angela Merkel also experienced the actions of the women’s rights group – in 2013 together with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the Hanover Fair, five naked women managed to get close to them – even though Merkel and Putin were probably among the best-protected politicians at the time.