Germany was shocked by the attack on an MEP, the social democrat Matthias Ecke, a candidate for the European elections on June 9, who was attacked on Friday night in Dresden while he was posting election posters and is seriously injured, as reported this Saturday police. Four individuals pounced on the 41-year-old politician and kicked and punched him. According to the Saxon branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Ecke will have to undergo surgery. In its digital edition, Der Spiegel reported that the MEP suffers fractures to his face and that he will undergo surgery on Monday.
“Democracy is threatened by something like this and that is why shrugging our shoulders is never an option,” declared the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, a social democrat like the attacked politician. Scholz spoke this afternoon at an SPD event in Berlin, and stressed that these events have to do with the speeches and moods that are created in the political sphere, in indirect allusion to the aggressive rhetoric of the far right.
On the same Friday in Dresden, a 28-year-old Green volunteer, who was also putting up posters, was beaten by four people, and the police suspect that they are the same attackers who attacked Ecke. In a statement this Saturday, the Greens explained that two teams putting up posters in the Saxon capital were “attacked and threatened”, and that one person was injured.
The President of the Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also condemned what happened and recalled other attacks against deputies and local politicians in recent days. On Thursday, two elected Green officials were attacked in Essen, western Germany, with one of them hit in the face. The previous Saturday, dozens of protesters surrounded the car of the green Katrin Göring-Eckardt, vice president of the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament), after a festive event in the east of the country, and police reinforcements had to be requested so that she could leave the place.
President Steinmeier urged this Saturday that “political discussion be developed peacefully, with arguments and respect,” and called not to allow “radicals to use brutality to destroy what represents democracies in electoral campaigns.”
A police spokesperson told Der Spiegel that Ecke's attackers, young men between 17 and 20 years old, were dressed in black, and that eyewitnesses described them as "from the far-right spectrum," although the latter does not mean that. There is official confirmation. The investigation has been entrusted to the federal police, suggesting that the possibility of politically motivated violence is being investigated.
“If a politically motivated attack is confirmed a few weeks before the European elections, this serious act of violence also constitutes a serious attack on democracy,” said the Minister of the Interior, also a social democrat Nancy Faeser, in a statement. The minister invoked the responsibility of “extremists and populists, who fuel a climate of growing violence through totally disproportionate verbal attacks.”
The Saxon SPD immediately pointed to the role in political hostility of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is rising in the polls in this eastern German state, which will hold regional elections in September. “The seeds sown by the AfD and other far-right groups are germinating; "His supporters are now completely uninhibited and clearly regard us Democrats as a game," said Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel, SPD leaders in Saxony.
For his part, the co-president of the AfD, Tino Chrupalla, condemned the attack on Matthias Ecke on the social network
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, was horrified by the attack on the German candidate in the upcoming European elections. “Horrified by the ruthless attack on MEP Matthias Ecke in Dresden. All my support and solidarity. Those responsible must be brought to justice. Matthias, the European Parliament is at your side,” Metsola wrote on the social network X.
Matthias Ecke has been a member of the European Parliament since 2022 and is running in the European elections on June 9 in tenth place on the SPD list and as the main candidate (Spitzenkandidat) of the Saxon branch of the party. He was previously a counselor in the Saxon regional Ministry of Economy. Born in the small town of Meerane, in the district of Zwickau, Ecke resides in Dresden with his wife and two daughters.
