A lawmaker for the national-conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was forced to physically defend himself over the weekend when he was violently attacked by a pair of far-left extremists in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Michael Meister, a state parliament member for the AfD, had been walking alone on the streets of Rostock on Saturday evening when two left-wing extremists—both of whom have yet to be identified—attacked him from behind while hurling insults like “You AfD Nazi pig,” German daily Junge Freiheit reports.
Despite being caught entirely off guard, Meister, a former police officer, managed to fend off the surprise attack with what he described as a “targeted punch,” which ultimately caused the pair of attackers to abandon the fight and flee the scene. Upon arriving at the hospital where he was treated for minor injuries, Meister informed police of the incident.
Nikolaus Kramer, the AfD group leader in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament, condemned the attack in a statement, saying: “How did we reach a place in this country where MPs are attacked on the street because of their party membership?”
He then urged Minister-President Manuela Schwesig (SPD), who heads Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s state government, to launch an investigation into the matter and publicly condemn the attack to send “a clear signal against such politically motivated violence”
“Otherwise the impression could arise that the state government is using two standards here because of the AfD membership, which could only motivate the perpetrators to carry out further attacks,” Kramer said, adding that the AfD wouldn’t be intimated by the prospect of physical violence.
The state security services have since opened an investigation into the attack, which they believe to have been politically motivated and carried out by individuals from the far-left scene.
The incident, unfortunately, is part of a broader and sustained wave of politically motivated violence directed at politicians and members of the AfD. For years now, despite having gone largely unreported by the mainstream press, members of the AfD have been the most frequent victims of political violence in the country.
Earlier this year, following an information request from the AfD parliamentary group to the federal Bundestag, it was revealed that police recorded 694 attacks on AfD members in 2020, over three times the number of attacks that were recorded against members of the Greens–the second most frequently affected group.
