The Saxon SPD’s leading candidate for the European elections, Matthias Ecke, was attacked and seriously injured while posting posters in Dresden on Friday evening, the SPD in Saxony announced. According to police, the attack occurred around 10:30 p.m. Four unknown people are said to have hit the 41-year-old. Ecke was taken to a hospital and had to undergo surgery.
Minutes earlier, according to the police, a group of four attacked a 28-year-old campaign worker for the Green Party who was also posting posters. The perpetrators hit and kicked him, and the 28-year-old was also injured. Based on the matching personal descriptions and the proximity in time and location, the state security investigators assume that the perpetrators are the same in both cases.
“The attack on Matthias Ecke is an unmistakable alarm signal to all people in this country. Our democratic values are under attack,” said the chairmen of the Saxony SPD, Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel. They call the attacks a blow “to the foundations of our democracy.”
Top politicians are also targets of politically motivated violence
Attacks on election workers and politicians are increasing, and the mood is particularly heated in eastern Germany, where three state elections are taking place this year. While there were 110 attacks on mayors, members of the state or federal parliament in Saxony in 2019, there were said to have been 302 such attacks last year. In Thuringia, the number of attacks has increased eightfold since 2018, according to figures from the Saxon Criminal Police Office.
Just a week ago, members of the Green Party were attacked while putting up election posters in several cities in Saxony. As the police announced last Sunday, a previously unknown man snatched a ladder from a 37-year-old in Chemnitz and used it to hit a poster that was attached to a light pole. The man then fled. The 37-year-old was slightly injured and filed a complaint for property damage and bodily harm.
“There were two incidents in central Saxony, one each in Chemnitz and Zwickau, in which people who put election posters on poles were attacked,” recalled Christin Furtenbacher, leader of the Green Party in Saxony. This has reached a further level of escalation that is unworthy of respectful social interaction and anti-democratic.
Even top politicians are no longer immune from becoming the target of such riots. At the beginning of January, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck was prevented from leaving his ferry by protesting farmers in Schleswig-Holstein. Last Saturday, the Vice President of the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, was stuck after an event because drunken mobsters stood in front of her vehicle and blocked her road.
The SPD in Saxony blames the AfD and right-wing extremists for the brutality in their dealings with each other. “Their supporters are now completely disinhibited and apparently view us Democrats as fair game when it comes to exercising our basic rights,” the party writes on its website.