A scandal is rocking Germany: members of the youth wing of the Die Linke (The Left) party (Linksjugend) in Hanover distributed stickers featuring Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel with a sniper’s crosshair over her head and the English caption “Aim Here.”
Lower Saxony police confirmed they have opened an investigation on charges of “public incitement to commit crimes and threats” after images of the stickers circulated on social media and AfD representatives filed a formal complaint.
Far from a fringe act of vandalism, the stickers bore the official logo of the radical leftist party’s youth branch, raising serious concerns about growing political radicalization.
The episode inevitably recalls the recent assassination of U.S. commentator Charlie Kirk, which the same Hanover group celebrated online with posts such as: “With a targeted shot to Kirk’s neck, the end of his inhumane policies was sealed.”
That the same aesthetic has now been deployed against an elected German politician marks a dangerous escalation in symbolic violence. What was once associated with loosely organized groups such as Antifa is now coming directly from an official youth organization tied to a parliamentary party.
The incident challenges the official narrative, repeated for years, that right-wing extremism represents the greatest threat to German democracy. While AfD has often been stigmatized for alleged ties to “hate speech,” a recognized sector of the far left is openly resorting to rhetoric of physical violence against political adversaries. It is not hard to imagine the outcry had the roles been reversed.
AfD leader Thorsten Weiß, deputy chairman of the party’s parliamentary group in Berlin, described the sticker as “a call to murder in the spirit of left-wing terrorism.” Other party figures demanded searches, interrogations, and arrests, stressing that the case fits the definition of a hate crime under standards promoted by the Left itself in recent years.
The youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Junge Union (JU), demanded that Linksjugend be placed under immediate surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and that all public funding they are receiving be suspended.
So far, the national leadership of Die Linke has remained silent about the activities of its Hanover branch. That silence is striking, especially given that mainstream parties have previously demanded swift and harsh measures when the far right was implicated in much less severe incidents. The disparity fuels perceptions of a selective tolerance toward extremism—so long as it comes from the left.
