Germany eyes harsher punishments in response to attacks on EU campaigners

5 months ago 21

After a string of assaults on EU election campaigners. German interior ministers vowed on Tuesday (7 May) to introduce harsher legal consequences for attacks on elected officials.

The meeting of Germany’s regional interior ministers was called by Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD, S&D) to discuss the German government’s response to the violent assault of SPD MEP Matthias Ecke on the weekend.

“Offenders who actively attack political activists must feel the full force of the law. That means swift, consistent proceedings and punishments. And that is also part of today’s decision by the interior ministers,” Faeser told reporters after the meeting.

“If we have to further tighten criminal law for this, I will swiftly discuss this with the justice minister,” she added.

With this, the interior ministers signalled that they were ready to follow demands raised by the regional states after the assault of Ecke and other campaigners at the start of the EU election campaign.

On Monday evening, Saxony’s interior minister Armin Schuster (CDU) had pressed ahead with an initiative to make threats to public officials an independent criminal offence.

“We need a new criminal charge in the Criminal Code for threatening public officials, elected representatives and volunteers,” Schuster told ARD.

The initiative is supposed to be discussed in the Bundesrat, the chamber that represents the regional states in the German parliament, with the goal of directing Justice Minister Marco Buschmann to change respective laws.

The states also plan to fast-track several legislative initiatives in the Bundestag to include attacks against politically active people in a separate clause in the criminal code.

Faeser also outlined a plan to adjust the population register in order to protect the home addresses of lawmakers.

Concerns about democratic values

The proposed measures came after left-wing parties raised concerns about the state of democracy in Germany. They accused the far-right of creating a “climate of fear” after several incidents of physical attacks in the run-up to the European elections in June.

In the days before the assault on Ecke, politicians from the Greens, Die Linke, and Volt were also attacked.

However, a question posed by the German far-right AfD to the government revealed that political violence in Germany affects the entire political spectrum, with the AfD being targeted the most. Out of a total of 234 violent offences registered by the police in 2023, the AfD was targeted 86 times, the Greens 62 times and the SPD 35.

(Kjeld Neubert | Euractiv.de – Edited by Nick Alipour)