Germany was shocked by the attack on an MEP, the Social Democrat Matthias Ecke, a candidate in the European elections on June 9, who was attacked in Dresden on Friday night while putting up election posters and is seriously injured, it was reported yesterday the 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 is suffering from facial fractures and will be operated on tomorrow.
"Democracy is threatened by something like this and that's why shrugging off is never an option", declared the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, a social democrat like the attacked politician. Scholz spoke like this yesterday 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 ultra-right.
On the same Friday in Dresden, a 28-year-old Greens volunteer, who was also putting up posters, was beaten to death by four people, and the police suspect that they are the same assailants who attacked Ecke. In a statement, Els Verds explained that two teams pasting 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 the events and evoked other attacks against local deputies and politicians in recent days. On Thursday, two Greens elected officials were attacked in Essen, in western Germany, and one of them was hit in the face. The previous Saturday, dozens of demonstrators 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 go away from the place
Yesterday, Steinmeier urged that "the political discussion be carried out peacefully, with arguments and respect", and called not to allow "radicals to use brutality to destroy what democracies represent in electoral campaigns".
A police spokesman told Der Spiegel that Ecke's assailants, young men between the ages of 17 and 20, wore black, and that eyewitnesses described them as "from the far-right spectrum." , although there is no official confirmation of the latter. "If an attack for political reasons is confirmed a few weeks before the European elections, this serious act of violence also constitutes a serious attack on democracy", stated the Minister of the Interior, also Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, in a statement . The minister invoked the responsibility of "extremists and populists, who feed a climate of increasing violence through totally disproportionate verbal attacks".
The Saxon SPD immediately pointed to the role in the political hostility of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, 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," said Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel, leaders of the SPD in Saxony.
For his part, the co-president of the AfD, Tino Chrupalla, condemned on the social network X the attack on Matthias Ecke saying that "electoral campaigns must be developed in a tough and constructive way, but without violence".
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, posted a message to X declaring herself "horrified" by the "merciless attack on MEP Matthias Ecke in Dresden": "All my support and solidarity. Those responsible must be brought to justice."
