A wave of attacks on German officials and politicians has raised new concerns about political violence and a collapse in civility ahead of several crucial elections this year, including in three states where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party could make significant gains books.
In the latest attack, on Friday evening, four people attacked a prominent Social Democratic politician who was putting up campaign posters in Dresden, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and eye socket that required emergency surgery.
The official, Matthias Ecke, is running for re-election to the European Parliament.
That evening, a Green Party campaigner, whose name has not been released, was attacked in the same residential area by what police believe was the same group of people. A day earlier, on Thursday, Rolf Fliss, the deputy mayor of the city of Essen, 300 miles west, was punched in the face by a group of men with whom he had had a “friendly conversation.”
The violent attack on Mr Ecke provoked a sharp response from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, himself a Social Democrat, in Berlin on Saturday.
“Democracy is threatened by such things, so shrugging acceptance is never an option,” Scholz said. “We will not accept it, and we, the decent and reasonable ones, are the majority” in Germany, he added.
Later, on Sunday, thousands protested against the violence in Berlin and Dresden. At Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, politicians from mainstream parties and members of civil society gave speeches denouncing the attacks.
On Tuesday evening, the interior ministers of Germany's sixteen states, as well as Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, will meet to discuss security concerns in the wake of the attacks.
Police have linked four teenagers to the attack on Mr Ecke. On Saturday, a 17-year-old boy, accompanied by his mother, walked into a Dresden police station and confessed to his role in the attack on the politician, police said.
On Sunday, police had raided the homes of three others, all aged 17 or 18, believed to have been involved in the attack. Dresden's public prosecutor said on Monday that at least one of them had ties to far-right ideology.
The recent attacks on political figures began to gain national attention last September, when a man threw a rock at Green Party leaders during a campaign event in Bavaria.
A mob prevented Robert Habeck, Germany's vice chancellor and a prominent Green politician, from disembarking a ferry in January. More recently, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, another senior Green Party politician and deputy speaker of parliament, was blocked as she left an event when 40 to 50 protesters surrounded her car.
Although most of the victims were members of the ruling Green and Social Democratic parties, the Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials AfD, was also targeted.
According to the party, vandals attacked a stand with AfD election materials in Dresden on Saturday. A 54-year-old who was tending the stand was unharmed.
“The situation has been coming to a head for some time,” said Andrea Römmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin.
According to preliminary government figures The police registered 2,790 attacks – both physical and verbal or other types of threats – on political representatives in 2023about twice as much as in 2019.
Some experts and rival parties point the finger at the far right and the AfD, saying it has often used inflammatory language against mainstream politicians. In 2017, when the AfD first entered the federal parliament, Alexander Gauland, one of the leading candidates at the time, promised on election night that “we will hunt them down,” an apparent reference to the governing coalition.
“I would call it affective polarization – it means that you no longer respond to the opponent's actual argument, but that you fundamentally delegitimize the opponent and label him as an enemy,” says Johannes Hillje, a political scientist who studies political communication.
In a statement released this weekend, the Social Democratic Party in the state of Saxony, where Dresden is the capital, called the attack an “unmistakable alarm signal.”
“Violent action and the intimidation of Democrats are the tools of fascists.” State party leaders Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel said this.
Mr Hillje said the problem is not only about growing extremes in the German political landscape, but also about verbal attacks from centrist mainstream politicians, especially towards the Greens.
“The dangerous thing is that democratic forces have adopted right-wing populist tropes and thus promoted a discourse that is not in the spirit of democracy,” Mr Hillje said. “They saw off the branch they were sitting on.”
The recent attacks are reminiscent of Germany's most prominent political assassination in recent years, when Walter Lübcke, a conservative lawmaker and defender of Angela Merkel's liberal refugee policy, was shot dead by a neo-Nazi in June 2019. Lübke's death, believed to be the first far-right political murder in Germany since the end of World War II, sparked a public soul-searching.
But as shocking as that crime was, it was targeted and carefully planned, and the killer had a criminal record and was a known, violent neo-Nazi. The recent attacks appear more opportunistic, but have still generated a strong response.
“The series of attacks by criminals on campaign teams of democratic parties is an attack on the foundations of our democracy,” said Mr Homann and Ms Michel of the Social Democrats of Saxony.