Four young Germans beat The Ecke, the SPD's top candidate in elections for the European Parliament in Saxony, so badly in Dresden on May 3, that he had to be treated in the hospital for a broken cheekbone and eye socket. He had been out posting campaign posters. The shockwaves are still being felt, even as far away as Berlin.In an unusual step, Faeser called for a special meeting of state interior ministers last Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., where they discussed improving security measures for politicians.
The interior ministers didn't even have the chance to log in to their video conference when, at around 4:15 p.m., a man hit Berlin Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) over the head with a blunt object that had been wrapped in a bag. She had been visiting a public library in Berlin's Neukölln district.
At 6:50 p.m., the ministers still hadn't logged out of their conversation when the Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler got attacked and spat upon while putting up posters in Dresden.
Is there any way of stopping all this?
There have been numerous attacks on politicians and volunteer election workers in recent days. Even the running camera of a Deutsche Welle film team that accompanied Mosler failed to deter the perpetrators. Society, it appears, has reached a new level of brutalization. Berlin politician Giffey has called it a "fair-game culture."
These are acts that are usually only in the headlines or public consciousness for a short amount of time. Taken together, though, they act like a corrosive solution: Drop by drop, act by act, they erode democratic structures. Will they corrode to the point that they threaten to collapse?
@msdropbear42 I wonder what the hell is going on on this goddamn continent! Why is this whole violence?!? What are those people hoping to achieve with this?!? This person, the Slovak prime-minister...
Can people just not behave in politics? Don't they want to have some sort of stability at least and not turn everything into something closely resembling a civil conflict of some sort?
@petrescatraian I was genuinely shocked when i read that article; i had no idea that the "poison of hate" had spread so wide & deep. It's so desperately sad, isn't it? I never have & probably never will understand why some people decide to hate other people & treat them so badly. As for such atrocious violence; it just seems so completely animalistic & unevolved. It's inexplicable to me. 😢
@msdropbear42 yea, indeed. There seems to be some significant increase in amount of hatred compared to other recent years. Not sure how widespread is it in today's society from my subjective POV, but it seems there and it is visible enough. I don't want to get to a point where one would be afraid to express their opinions.
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