The highly politicized saga about last week’s attack on the German socialist MEP Matthias Ecke (S&D, SPD) continues. During a meeting of the country’s regional interior ministers on Wednesday, May 7th, the German government announced plans to tighten the criminal law and introduce harsher punishment for assaulting politicians or their staff.
“Offenders who actively attack political activists must feel the full force of the law. That means swift, consistent proceedings and punishments,” federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) said after the meeting, adding that the decision to explore changes to the criminal code enjoyed the backing of a strong consensus in the room.
“If we have to further tighten criminal law for this, I will swiftly discuss this with the justice minister,” Faeser added.
Following the initiative of Saxony’s interior minister, Armin Schuster (CDU), a demand among ministers has also been raised to make the threatening of public officials and elected representatives—as well as their campaign staff, including volunteers—an independent criminal offense.
Another proposal mentioned by Faeser was to adjust the population register in order to protect the home addresses and privacy of lawmakers.
All of these initiatives will be discussed in the Bundesrat, the federal body representing the regional states in the Parliament, with the aim of directing Justice Minister Marco Buschmann to present concrete proposals for the legal changes in front of the Bundestag as soon as possible.
Hours after the meeting, former Berlin mayor and current senator Franziska Giffey (SPD) was attacked in the capital when a man hit her with a bag from behind, leading to the politician being “briefly” hospitalized for head and neck pain, the police said.
Berlin mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) issued a strongly worded condemnation afterward, saying “Anyone who attacks politicians is attacking our democracy. We will not tolerate this.”
The astroturfed public debate about politicians’ safety was prompted by an attack on socialist MEP Matthias Ecke last weekend, immediately blamed on the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) by the mainstream political forces, just because the police found “traces” of right-wing extremism on the phones of one of the four teenage assailants.
Leftist and center-right parties in the European Parliament answered by calling for a joint statement renouncing the alleged far-right violence and, along with several European leaders, regurgitating the German government’s talking points that the attack somehow proves AfD’s inherently antidemocratic nature.
Ironically, it was just recently that the German government was forced to make its statistics on political violence public, revealing that AfD politicians are the most likely to be on the receiving end of street attacks among all German parties—no doubt partly because of the mainstream’s relentless demonization of the party.
In 2023, over 230 violent offenses against politicians were registered by the German police. Out of those, AfD was targeted 86 times, while the Greens are in second place with 62 attacks, followed by the social-democrat SDP with 35.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel even called out the apparent hypocrisy on Wednesday, saying that despite the alarming number of attacked conservative officials, no “expressions of solidarity” nor “political demands” can be heard from the political mainstream for them.
Indeed, when Tino Chrupalla, AfD’s other co-president was stabbed last year with a hypodermic syringe, the mainstream’s only reaction was callousness and malice, insinuating that the politician had staged the incident.
