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The New Hatred For Politicians: Why Are Attacks and Incitement on the Rise in Germany?
Violent attacks, arson attacks, death threats: Brutal hostilities against politicians are shaking democracy in Germany. Experts are observing a growing far-right youth culture and are calling for more protection, especially for public officials in local authorities.
The situation in Germany is so dramatic right now that Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) decided at the beginning of last week that something had to be done. Even if only symbolic, she said.
Four young Germans beat The Ecke, the SPD's top candidate in elections for the European Parliament in Saxony, so badly in Dresden on May 3, that he had to be treated in the hospital for a broken cheekbone and eye socket. He had been out posting campaign posters. The shockwaves are still being felt, even as far away as Berlin.
In an unusual step, Faeser called for a special meeting of state interior ministers last Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., where they discussed improving security measures for politicians.
The interior ministers didn't even have the chance to log in to their video conference when, at around 4:15 p.m., a man hit Berlin Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) over the head with a blunt object that had been wrapped in a bag. She had been visiting a public library in Berlin's Neukölln district.
At 6:50 p.m., the ministers still hadn't logged out of their conversation when the Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler got attacked and spat upon while putting up posters in Dresden.
Is there any way of stopping all this?
There have been numerous attacks on politicians and volunteer election workers in recent days. Even the running camera of a Deutsche Welle film team that accompanied Mosler failed to deter the perpetrators. Society, it appears, has reached a new level of brutalization. Berlin politician Giffey has called it a "fair-game culture."
Hatred and agitation against politicians have long been a problem in Germany. It has been five years since a right-wing extremist murdered the Kassel district president and center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician Walter Lübcke on his terrace. The official statistics are also filled with many other cases of violence, insults and threats.
The frequency of incidents in the early days of the European Parliamentary elections this year has revealed a new level of uninhibitedness. The attacks, which are often happening in the day and often with many witnesses, are aimed at the heart of democracy. They mainly affect local politicians who have no state protection, no bodyguards and no professionals from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) to accompany them.
Where is this new brutality coming from, why do the perpetrators apparently feel so safe and emboldened? And what are the consequences for the politicians who have been attacked? Do they abandon their political commitment and do exactly what their opponents hope for? Or do they persevere – and, if so, through how many attacks?
Examples of hostility can be found in every party in many regions of Germany. Local Mayor Florian Liening-Ewert of the center-right Christian Social Union (CSU) party recently found the two halves of a pig's head on his doorstep in the Lower Franconia region of Bavaria. Three weeks ago, when Tim Wagner, a member of the federal parliament with the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) was helping to put up campaign posters in the town of Eisenberg in the eastern state of Thuringia, three thugs ended up kicking his car. Meanwhile, Arnd Focke of the SPD, resigned as mayor in the town of Estorf in the western state of Lower Saxony following right-wing extremist hostilities.
These are acts that are usually only in the headlines or public consciousness for a short amount of time. Taken together, though, they act like a corrosive solution: Drop by drop, act by act, they erode democratic structures. Will they corrode to the point that they threaten to collapse?
In 2023, the German government reported 86 violent crimes against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, 62 cases against the Greens, 20 against the far-left Left Party, 19 against the center-right CDU, 10 against the FDP and two against the CSU.
The AfD Reports the Most Attacks
In terms of acts such as threats, insults, defamation, libel, slander and incitement to hatred, the Greens were reported to have the most cases in 2023 with 947, followed by the SPD (293), the FDP (266), the AfD (236), the CDU (134), the CSU (65) and the Left Party (52).
These figures, which are supposed to provide a neutral basis, have themselves become the subject of dispute. The AfD points out that most of the physical attacks were committed against members of its party. But many politicians from other parties doubt this. They say that they themselves would by no means report all cases because doing so usually produces few results, and it takes up valuable time during the election campaign. They claim that the AfD, for its part, reports everything out of principle.
It is difficult to verify who is correct. However, it is undisputed that all parties are more or less confronted with acts of violence. The brutalization of public officials appears to be a phenomenon across all of Germany. The protesters who wanted to board a ferry in January carrying German Economics Minister Robert Habeck had gathered in Schlüttsiel in North Frisia. And in February, a Green Party event in Biberach in the southern state of Baden-Württemburg was cancelled due to aggressive troublemakers. Nevertheless, statistics indicate that local politicians in particular are threatened or attacked more often in the states formerly belonging to communist East Germany than in the West.
In recent weeks, the violence suddenly seemed to be everywhere, sudden and brutal in its nature. But in that time span, too, the reports mainly came from the eastern states. For many, it is reminiscent of the "baseball bat years" that followed Germany's reunification. Only this time without the baseball bats – at least for now.
The "baseball bat years" are a reference to the acts of violence by right-wing extremists that shook the eastern part of the country in the 1990s. Young extremists carried out attacks and terrorized entire villages and towns for years. Places like Rostock-Lichtenhagen or Hoyerswerda are still household names today as symbols of the dark side of the reunification frenzy. There were injuries and deaths.
In the 1990s, the thugs often can from the large Eastern Bloc prefabricated housing developments that had become socio-economically disadvantaged hotspots after reunification. But not a single one of the alleged perpetrators who beat up Matthias Ecke in Dresden and left him hospitalized just over a week ago lives in a place like that.
Quentin J., who is considered the main perpetrator, lives near the Elbe River in Laubegast, a middle-class district of Dresden. There are two names on the doorbell. No one answers. J. is said to be one of four suspected perpetrators who attacked a group putting up election posters at around 10:30 p.m. on Friday, May 3. When the teenager turned himself in to the police in Dresden a week ago Sunday, his mother accompanied him.
The 17-year-old is said to belong to the right-wing extremist scene. According to sources in security circles, the search of his home and mobile phone uncovered evidence of that. Investigators believe he belongs to the Elblandrevolte, a Dresden chapter of the Young Nationalists, the youth wing of the neo-Nazi NPD party, which is now known as Die Heimat (The Homeland). Saxony's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is monitoring the far-right group, which had only been founded in February.
The three other suspects, aged 17 and 18, were identified by the State Criminal Police Office after analyzing evidence found at J.'s home.
Two days before the attack on Matthias Ecke, Quentin J. apparently took part in a right-wing extremist demonstration in Dresden together with other members of the Elblandrevolte and the Young Nationalists. Photos published by activists allegedly show him walking behind an imperial Reich flag and a banner that reads: "Put a stop to Scholz, Habeck, Lindner & Co: Stop the robbery. Cut taxes!" It's a reference to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Economics Minister Habeck of the Greens and Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP. He also reportedly attended an AfD rally on Dresden's Neumarkt square on May 1.
Quentin J. added the city of Dresden and a German flag to one of his Instagram profiles. He had added an "88" to his profile name, the abbreviation in the far-right scene for "Heil Hitler." Investigators are still looking into whether the other suspects also belong to the right-wing scene.
What makes the case of the Elblandrevolte so worrying is that the group has not previously struck people with knowledge of the scene as being particularly influential. "There are a lot of groups like this – in the past, we would have called them Kameradenschaften (informally organized neo-Nazi groups)," says Michael Nattke, the managing director of Kulturbüro Sachsen, a network of advice centers and mobile teams in the state of Saxony. "And this group has obviously only been around for a few months."
In other words, a small breeding ground for right-wing extremist violence that has evidently had a rapid impact. Was the brutal aggression against the SPD politician more of a spontaneous, eruptive act, or had it been fermenting in the youth for some time?
Young people have a shorter fuse, which is why there is more violence, says Nattke. He discovered what he considers to be a conspicuous feature of the young group, which apparently also maintained close contacts with the neo-Nazi Jugendblock (Youth Block) in the Saxon city of Bautzen. "The fact that such young people are networking with each other is remarkable," says Nattke. "As a rule, older neo-Nazis or party cadres generally play a role those kinds of contacts, but we don't know anything about that in this case."
According to a recent report from the Kulturbüro, there has been an increase in far-right attacks in eastern Saxony in recent months. "Young, action-oriented neo-Nazis" repeatedly attracted attention with serious crimes. "Perhaps something new is emerging," says Nattke, "that hasn't existed for a very long time."
Stephan Conrad, 39, who wears a full bear and glasses, is fighting against the shift to the right in Döbeln in central Saxony and welcomes visitors on the second floor of the "House of Democracy."
Conny, as his friends call him, is a social worker for an organization called Treibhaus. There is probably no one else who knows the city's youth as well as he does. He's from Döbeln and has lived here for four decades. He now offers guided tours of the town covering local Nazi history for ninth graders.
"There's a new young generation that is open to right-wing ideology and violence," says Conrad. Two factors reinforced this trend: the right-wing arm of the fan scene of the third-division football club Dynamo Dresden and the AfD, which is classified as right-wing extremist in Saxony. Their electoral successes, as Conrad puts it, have "created a climate in which such violence is more likely."
Conrad is familiar with those types of changes in the political climate. In Döbeln, fewer and fewer young people view themselves as left-wing, he says, before going on to list attacks by right-wing extremists. "Arson attacks, mobs, butyric acid attacks, vandalism, an assault with injuries," he says. Things are comparatively quiet in the region at the moment, but who knows if it will stay that way? "There's a danger that we're just at the beginning of the new baseball bat years," says Conrad.
Tobias Burdukat, 41, a social worker from Grimma near Leipzig, also fears this could happen. He has registered an uptick in right-wing violence and confirms what his colleague Conrad from Döbeln has observed. "The thugs who attack other people today are often the sons of the thugs from back then," he says. If you're not careful, says Burdukat, "we'll end up back in the 1990s."
But the situation is different from 30 years ago in one crucial respect: Back then, far right parties like the German People's Union (DVU), the Republikaner and the neo-Nazi NPD had no prospects of power. Today, however, the AfD has long since become a popular East German party. In Döbeln, the NPD had a single representative on the city council until 2019, when the AfD won five seats. Conrad is certain that the far-right Free Saxons will also be represented in the city parliament after the local elections four weeks from now.
A Rising Right Youth Movement
He is following how right-wing ideology is spreading among young people. At recent LGTBQ+ pride parades, "kids who weren't even 14 were making a racket. During a car parade, young people stood on a traffic circle and waved 'Free Saxony' flags." And the youngest candidates for the city council also came from the far right: The AfD had nominated three people aged 18, 19 and 21. Conrad is seeing a clear shift to the far right among young people.
This seems to correspond with the figures collected by RAA Saxony, a regional organization working to strengthen democracy. Experts at the group, which also monitors the far-right, registered 248 right-wing motivated attacks last year, an increase of 21 percent in 12 months. Well over half of all cases involve bodily harm. RAA experts are also observing a growing right-wing youth movement.
In addition to his job, Conrad volunteers as a local politician and has been a member of the city council for the SPD for five years. He is seeking re-election in June and began putting up the first campaign posters in recent days. "I'm not afraid, I can't see that at all," he says. "Fear is the beginning of fascism."
Political scientist Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education in Tutzing in Bavaria, is also concerned with the question of when individual cases develop into a trend and when various acts of violence become a powerful attack on the entire political system.
There's a diagram she likes to show in her presentations. It comes from a study from the SPD-aligned Friedrich Ebert Foundation's "Mitte Study," a survey on right-wing extremist attitudes in German society, and describes a spiral of escalation, the path to political radicalization. It begins with the belief in conspiracy narratives and extends to the tendency to follow populist slogans and the approval of political violence. A development of anger that turns into hatred and violence. Since the fierce debates during the coronavirus pandemic, Münch says that this development has been observed more frequently throughout the country.
Münch is worried. "It doesn't just affect those who have been physically attacked," says the researcher. "Other people who are politically active are being intimidated." That is obviously the goal, and those who pursue it are "gaining the upper hand with every act."
Münch believes that politicians setting the wrong tone are also responsible for the development. She cites the example of Bavarian state Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger, who gave an angry speech against Berlin politics in Erding outside of Munich almost a year ago. She says it was a call for people not to be taken for a ride, to fight back.
The political scientist says she doesn't want to accuse politicians like Aiwanger of being directly responsible for violence. But right-wing extremists could see some of their actions legitimized by such statements, supposedly covered by the right of resistance in the German Basic Law, which is supposed to protect the state from enemies of the constitution. "What is insidious and absurd," says Münch, "is when the article in the Basic Law is misused to target politicians who aren't to a person's liking."
A "Catastrophe" for Democracy
But what could stop or possibly reverse this development? Only the rule of law can help against those who question the entire political system, says Münch. And that applies to both left-wing and right-wing extremists. Crimes like the one in Dresden must be punished quickly, harshly and clearly. But that also requires having enough staff in the police and public prosecutor's office, and the state must not allow itself to appear weak. And for all the others? "Civic education doesn't go far enough," says Münch.
She argues that Germany needs more credible politicians like the North Rhine-Westphalian Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann of the CDU, who is so popular because he comes across as being authentic. The parties, she argues, need to recruit more smartly, and there should also be people sitting in parliament who are not university educated. Language, she adds, needs to be clearer and policies more sustainable. "It helps not to declare that problems are solvable in one fell swoop, but to work through them step by step," says Münch. "And to explain to the people that this is arduous work." That approach, she argues, could reduce the distance between politicians and citizens.
"At the moment, however, it's not just the citizens' distrust of politics that are growing," says Münch. "In the meantime, politicians are also being forced to not trust the citizens." This is a "catastrophe" for democracy.
The scars of Michael C. Müller's very personal catastrophe are still visible. Six panes on his front door are cracked. To the right, a large panel has been screwed onto the facade of his small wooden house, only barely covering the traces of the fire.
At 3 a.m. on February 19, a fire broke out at the home of the local SPD politician in Waltershausen-Schnepfenthal, a small town in the district of Gotha in the eastern state of Thuringia. Fires burned in several places there at the same time, he says. A car burned and the front door as a family with a baby slept in the house, which Müller had rented out on Airbnb. A neighbor managed to prevent the worst with a fire extinguisher, and the fire department took care of the rest.
It must be assumed that this was a targeted arson attack on the politician. A short time earlier, he had organized a demonstration with the Buntes Waltershausen (Diverse Waltershausen) alliance under the slogan "Never again means now! We support democracy and oppose fascism." It was held around the time of the revelations about a secret meeting of right-wing extremists in Potsdam, at which far-right politicians discussed ways of deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including ones who hold German citizenship. After some hesitation, Müller added his name to the call for a demonstration, registered the event under his name and hosted it. Around 200 people attended the demonstration, which took place on February 2. The fire at his house happened on the 19th.
Müller, 47, was abroad that day when the phone rang in the middle of the night and his neighbor alerted him: "Michael, your place is on fire." He thought of his guests, of his little wooden house. "It was a real shock. I couldn't imagine that someone could do something like that," Müller says.
The SPD politician is sitting on his sofa in jeans and a black and white T-shirt, a green sock on his left foot and a yellow one on his right, still looking around his living room in disbelief months after the fire. "But I immediately thought about our demo, and I thought: The far-right scene did this." He had also told the police this, but he says the officers first looked into whether he could have set fire to his house, on suspicion of insurance fraud. Then they began looking into all the people in his circle of friends. To this date, the special commission has yet to name any suspects. Müller nonetheless felt the consequences, triggering feelings of mistrust and fear.
He began searching his yard at night with a headlamp for intruders. He began constantly watching his back on the street. He has since installed floodlights on his home and a video system at the door. The smoke detector in the living room sends a signal to his mobile phone. Police patrols drive past his house several times a day, as if he were a top politician. Müller is actually merely the deputy chairman of the Waltershausen SPD local association and a member of the state party council.
He had somehow been able to suppress all that until he learned about the assault on Matthias Ecke in Dresden through social media. Müller himself is running in the local elections for the SPD in Waltershausen. He had just put up posters around town with a friend. "Of course, you immediately ask yourself: Could it happen again?"
Müller talks about a far-right event against wind power in the forest. He says an acquaintance had been there to discuss the matter. He claims that people in attendance were told that anyone who disagreedould leave. The answer to the question of what happens if you still hold a different opinion was: "Then your house will be set on fire."
Müller says that "the whole bad mood in the country was a gradual process." Over the years, the red lines have shifted further and further, and now many things are suddenly normal. "Now, everything is on a knife's edge." Either people dare to resist, Müller argues – or everything will get worse and worse. "Society simply cannot accept all this."
Müller has also vacillated on whether he wants to continue as a politician. "Sometimes you run out of energy, and you'd rather do things that are fun." In the end, everything became a struggle. After the fire, he thought: "Is it worth it? Does society want people to stand up to and oppose the shift to the right?"
Müller then received a large box from the national party. It is emblazoned with a red fist and the inscription: "For a society based on solidarity. Stay strong against the right." The box contains 4,000 letters from fellow party members offering encouragement to Müller. The Social Democrat was moved to tears, as he recounts. He says that the feeling of not being alone provides him with strength. So, he ultimately decided to run in the local election, even though his house hasn't been repaired yet. He wants to win as many votes as possible. "So that the AfD doesn't get as many."
A lot has actually happened since the fire at Müller's home in Thuringia. Concrete measures were agreed to at a security summit in Erfurt at the end of April. The online platform Stark im Amt (Strong in Office) has been in place since 2021, an initiative of the Körber Foundation with the municipal umbrella organizations, which is primarily aimed at local politicians and advises them in the event they experience hostilities.
Help is also available in other German states. Christiane Müller is responsible for these activities at the state Office of Criminal Investigation in Saxony. Sometimes she's torn. On the one hand, the 50-year-old wants to cite the dangers to which local politicians are exposed. On the other, she doesn't want to scare them with these kinds of instructions:
Inspect your cars and bikes before you set off!
Don't always walk along the same route to work!
Have an emergency plan for your family!
It's Müller's job to help the victims, not to hunt down the perpetrators. She works at the Central Contact Point for Victims of (Right-)Extremist Threats, where she advises people affected by "anti-Semitism, racism, right-wing extremism and anti-queer crime."
In the election year, there is a special focus on local politicians and those who want to become one. The people who come to her are finding things like burning grave candles in front of their driveways.
In local politics, especially, there are also many people who believe that holding a public office exposes one to a certain level of hostility, Müller explains. That many politicians don't feel they should report verbal abuse online, for example. Politicians, for instance, often choose not to report insults received online, she says. "It's part of it to show weakness," Müller advises. Also to protect themselves. But at the end of the day, this could result in politicians no longer exposing themselves to danger.
"It sounds totally stupid, but it all feels easier," says Barbara Domke, discussing her new life now that she is no longer in office. Domke, 45, previously served as a member of the Cottbus city council, but since late last summer, she has been nothing more than a politically engaged citizen who laughs a lot. Often about herself.
She's sitting at a snack bar opposite the Cottbus Central Station. "It used to be that you would constantly be turning around and asking yourself: Who is that looking at you in the supermarket? Is someone pointing at you?" Domke still reflexively scans the people walking past the café table to the right and left.
Domke grew up in a Communist-era prefabricated housing estate in Cottbus, a youth among punks. She says she got through the baseball bat years under the protection of the group. "Once they chased a friend of ours and seriously injured him, and it spread like wildfire through the town." Then she finished high school in 1998, got her training, graduated from university and got a job doing refugee social work.
Wished a Flight through the Chimney of Auschwitz
"There were more than 100 of us in my high school graduating class, and there was only one Nazi," she says. But starting in 2014, she noticed a growing number of strange posts on Facebook and then began challenging them online. She took part in demonstrations on the streets against right-wing extremists and also observed protests held by the "Querdenker," a large, loose-knit group of people opposing the government's strict measures aimed at containing the coronavirus.
She threw herself into online debates until the 2017 federal election, when she served as an election worker. She remembers the vote-counting: "It was just AfD, AfD, AfD," she says. She joined the Green Party, and ran unsuccessfully for the state parliament, only to later land a seat on the city council.
And she remained there until she was struck by the feeling shared by many people who are politically active against the extreme right: That she had become the enemy. In an X-Space, a kind of live talk on the social media platform X, she argued with a man about the coronavirus pandemic and lost her composure for a moment. Jokingly, she said, of course she buys study results custom-tailored to the facts she wants to present – after all, she earns 25,000 euros a month.
"I named a deliberately absurd sum to make the irony clear," she says. "It's well-known that I'm a social worker." But it didn't help.
On extreme right-wing portals, in videos and in articles, people dissected her appearance. It was used as evidence to encourage people's contempt of politics and also of the supposed disregard the Green Party has for the people. Above all, however, it marked her: This is Barbara Domke, this is what she looks like — and she's our enemy. In the most recent death threat, she says, she was wished a flight through the chimney of Auschwitz. She's used to the threats. Saboteurs once demolished her car. This time, however, it was even more intense, and a short time later, she resigned from office. Things quieted down after that.
But why? Domke continues to think the same way she did before, she's still a member of the Green Party, she wants to take part in the local election campaign, and she expresses herself on social media. Domke reflects on this for a moment. "I think they believe they have won," she says. "And as bad as this may seem, they're right in a sense."
She says she doesn't go into the city alone. When she observes right-wing extremist demonstrations, she stays close to the police. A meeting like the one here in a café is fine, but not at just any time. "I probably wouldn't have sat here on a Friday afternoon. Also not if there's a football match happening," she says.
For Domke, this is a break from local politics, but it's not necessarily the end of her political engagement. She is still active within the party, and also within the church.
She says goodbye in the direction of the parking lot. Her husband brought her here and also comes back to pick her up. To be on the safe side.
Are the pillars of democracy eroding? Have they already eroded? Is Domke an example of this?
The supposedly small-scale local politics is so important because it is often the entry point for a political career. If no one dares to take this step, the promise of democracy can no longer be kept. In principle, any member of the population can be elected to office if only they are able to get a majority of voters behind them.
Many smaller towns in Germany are held together by volunteer mayors. They are dependent on finding someone who is willing to take the job on a voluntary basis. Otherwise, the structure will collapse.
Are there ideas on how to stop the erosion, the violence and the hatred?
Responding to the Increased Threat
The meeting held by the federal interior minister and her colleagues at the state level last Tuesday delivered few ideas on these issues. Colleagues in the German states turned up their noses when they heard Federal Interior Minister Faeser's requests. They felt like it was a stunt on her part aimed at burnishing her political profile. But the politicians weren't bickering over proposals for better protections for politicians and other campaigners. The row was over who would be allowed to announce the possible results to the public afterward. The resolution paper is a document of helplessness with references to what is already being done, along with declarations of intent and requests for further assessments.
Nonetheless, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is responding to the increased threat. At appearances and events with a "high level of risk," politicians are to be accompanied by more bodyguards than before. Almost 100 additional bodyguards are also to be trained in time for the 2025 federal elections. The problem here is that while the BKA is responsible for protecting members of government and members of the federal parliament, it is not tasked with ensuring the safety of local politicians.
The political discussion on what needs to be done beyond this is currently in full swing.
"The aim now is to provide maximum protection for those affected by violence on an ad hoc basis," Thuringia's Interior Minister Georg Maier of the SPD told DER SPIEGEL. "It's not wrong to review legislative initiatives, but that won't help in the short term." He argues that it's about establishing direct contact with the police through hotlines and getting in touch with people at risk. "We have already introduced these measures in Thuringia." Volunteers and people from civil society should have no inhibitions about contacting the police.
Jan Redmann, the chair of the CDU in the state of Brandenburg, the head of the party's state parliamentary group and top candidate for the state elections, says: "As a society, are lacking a casual forum where we can have heated discussions and then drink a beer together again afterward. We need more opportunities where we can have direct and respectful exchanges again."
"Every Act of Violence Must Be Made Public"
Thorsten Frei, first parliamentary secretary of the the joint parliamentary group of the CDU and it's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, says: "Our open society thrives on the fact that elected representatives do not live and work in isolation from the public, but are in constant communication with voters. It is essential that the federal and state governments review their security plans in light of recent incidents and coordinate closely, but that's also not enough." If a justice system is understaffed staffed and poorly equipped digitally and prisoners have to be released early from pre-trial detention because proceedings take too long, "then the rule of law sends a devastating message," says Frei.
The politicians in Berlin are trapped in their mechanisms. They have to solve a lot of things at the party level, that's their job. And at least initially, that is of little aid to local politicians.
David Begrich is a social scientist, theologian and employee at the right-wing extremism monitoring office of the Magdeburg association Miteinander, where he advises local politicians on how to deal with the AfD. It should become standard practice, he says, to cover the costs of punctured tires or smashed windows, for example. The most important thing, however, is visible solidarity, especially from those who are better protected than local politicians.
If a mayor is attacked, says Begrich, the state governor should ideally drive by and make a public appearance with the local politician. Begrich believes that the reluctance of political parties to address such attacks too loudly or frequently is wrong. "Those who have fantasies of violence or have even lived them out need to be made to feel under pressure again."
Maja Wallstein, an SPD member of the federal parliament from Cottbus, says: "Every act of violence against politicians is terrible and must be made public. But my concern is that the Nazis will feel emboldened and the brave will lose their courage. That's why we always have to emphasize that we democrats are always stronger. It is in our power to not let the Nazis win. However. the dedication of individuals alone isn't enough to make this work. We need as many people as possible."
With that message, Wallstein is trying to reach civil society.
The sheer masses of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, with their message of "We are many!" has so far been the only means of revealing how thick and stable the foundations of democracy in the country still are.
That was after the first major domestic political scare of the year, when the news came out about the secret meeting in Potsdam. All over Germany, people took to the streets to demonstrate for diversity, democracy and against extremism. That momentum could still be built on.
Imagine, for example, that every time a democratic party were to put up a campaign poster, a small group of citizens were to join them. People who are passing by who happen to be there. That would turn each individual poster campaign into a demonstration in support of democracy.
Written by Maik Baumgärtner, Rasmus Buchsteiner, Jörg Diehl, Deike Diening, Florian Gathmann, Fabian Hillebrand, Martin Knobbe, Levin Kubeth, Peter Maxwill, Ann-Katrin Müller, Sven Röbel, Jonas Schaible, Christian Teevs, Steffen Winter and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt.
© 2024, Der Spiegel
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