A member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left party was attacked and badly hurt while campaigning in an eastern city for the European Parliament election next month, the party announced on Saturday.
It was the most recent of many violent and harassing incidents that have made political tensions higher in Germany before the elections. Scholz’s Social Democrats, or SPD, started their official campaign for the June 9 vote with a big event in Hamburg last week. Hamburg is where Scholz has lived for a long time.
Matthias Ecke, who is running for the SPD, got hurt while hanging up posters in Dresden last Friday night, according to the party. It was said that he was brought to a hospital and needed surgery for his injuries. The police said a 41-year-old was hurt by four men. The same group had also hurt a Greens party worker on the same street just before.
Nancy Faeser, who is in charge of the country’s internal security, said that if it’s shown that the attack on Ecke was done for political reasons, it would be a big threat to our democracy.
“We are facing a new kind of violence that goes against democracy,” Faeser said. She said she would do more to protect the democratic people in our country.
The government and opposition parties are saying that their members and supporters have been attacked recently. They want the police to do more to protect politicians and rallies.
A lot of bad things have happened in the eastern part of the country, where most people don’t like Scholz’s government. The right-wing and anti-government AfD party in Germany is likely to win many votes in both the European elections and the state elections in Germany this fall.
The vice president of the German parliament, Katrin Goering-Eckardt, was in a car last week. When she tried to leave a rally, protesters surrounded her car for almost an hour. The Christian Democrats and The Left party say their workers have been scared and had their posters taken down too.
The main parties say that the AfD is connected to violent neo-Nazi groups and is making the political atmosphere more unfriendly. A leader of a political party called AfD, Bjoern Hoecke, is in trouble for using a Nazi phrase that is not allowed. Germany’s spy agency is watching some parts of the political party.
The Social Democrats in Saxony have chosen Ecke as their main candidate for the European elections. They said they will continue their campaign even though they are facing intimidation using “fascist methods”.
“The ideas spread by the AfD and other right-wing extremists are starting to grow,” said branch leaders Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel in a statement they made together. “Those people and their supporters are responsible for what is happening in this country. ”
Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of the AfD, said his party strongly opposes physical attacks on politicians from any party. He said that election campaigns should be challenging and focused on important issues, but they should not involve any violence.
The AfD says its members are also attacked and harassed, especially when they hold rallies that often have people protesting against them.
On Saturday, the police arrested a man who hit and slightly hurt a state lawmaker for the AfD while he was campaigning in Norden, a town near Germany’s North Sea coast. The attacker also threw eggs at the lawmaker.