This VORTEX blog post complements the piece ‘Democracy under threat: The increasing normalisation of threats and violence directed at politicians and electoral candidates’ published by Joshua Farrell-Molloy in June. He reported on ‘(a) string of incidents that occurred in Germany and Ireland during May and early June’ and identified this as a ‘worrying trend of mounting hostility and aggression directed towards politicians in what has become an increasingly incendiary political environment’. He also addressed the consequences of these attacks, which are damaging to democracy: Electoral candidates and especially female and non-white candidates ‘risk reducing their democratic participation due to intimidation’. He therefore concludes that ‘defending the democratic process may require installing measures to better protect these elected representatives and candidates from threats and physical harm’. This VORTEX blog post will build on these thoughts in the German context. It will look at some of the figures published on attacks against politicians in Germany to date, giving an idea of the extent of the problem and its development, even if the number of unreported cases is estimated to be high. It will also discuss some of the factors that contribute to this phenomenon such as widespread feelings of being overwhelmed in the face of multiple crises and disappointment with the political handling of these, feelings that can be catered for with enemy images against political actors. A following blog post in October will deal with the consequences of these attacks on those affected, as well as concrete measures that are available and necessary to prevent further damage to the foundations of our democracy.
The number of attacks on politicians in recent years and the rising trend in the number of cases is evident in several sources. The most intuitive, albeit imprecise, source are crime statistics. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office,for example, the number of offences against holders of a political office or mandate tripled from 1527 to 4458 cases between 2017 and 2021. When presenting the number of cases of politically motivated crime in the past year, 2023, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office spoke of around 5,400 attacks in 2023, an increase of 29% compared to the previous year and also a tripling of attacks within the past five years. However, not everyone affected reports the attack, meaning that many attacks are not even included in these crime statistics. Yet, reporting statistics also show high figures. According to preliminary figures, a total of 2,790 attacks on representatives or members of the parties represented in the Bundestag were reported in 2023. Of these, representatives of Alliance 90/The Greens were most frequently affected in 1,219 cases, representatives of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 478 cases and representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 420 cases.
The most reliable source for assessing the extent of violence are scientific surveys. Various studies in Germany have focussed on different political offices or placed a particular geographical focus. A few selected studies from the last three years serve as examples. In 2022, the Motra network and its transfer partners published a municipal monitoring study on hatred, hate speech and violence towards municipal officials. Of the 1,495 people surveyed, 46% stated that they had experienced hostility towards themselves or their relatives between May and October 2021. Of these, 70% were verbal or written hostilities, 26% were hate postings and 4% were physical assaults. The respondents themselves experienced direct hostility or attacks in the digital space once or twice a month. According to a representative, nationwide survey of 1,641 mayors commissioned by the Körber Foundation (2020-21), 57% of respondents had been insulted, threatened or physically attacked at least once. Finally, a study conducted by the University of Duisburg-Essen in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation (2022) came to a similar conclusion: 2166 people involved in local government (councillors, mayors and political election officials) in major German cities were surveyed. Around 60% had already experienced hostility or aggression directed at them at least once.
What is behind these high numbers and this increase in violence? There is no simple and all-encompassing explanation. Yet, feelings such as anger or disappointment with current politics and the state are currently widespread and are often the result of multiple and intertwined crisis experiences in recent years. The so-called refugee crisis, coronavirus pandemic, climate crisis or inflation are putting citizens in a situation that makes them dissatisfied and triggers feelings of powerlessness, as their situation is often neither self-inflicted nor is there any possibility of self-efficacy to solve their problems. Expectations that ‘those at the top’ will help to solve their own problems swiftly are disappointed, since there are no such swift solutions. Population surveys show that trust in the state’s ability to act is increasingly declining. According to a 2023 survey, only 27% of citizens still believe that the state is capable of fulfilling its tasks. The key question therefore is how such feelings of powerlessness and dissatisfaction can increasingly lead to hostility and violence against politicians.
One explanatory factor lies in the narratives of populist and right-wing actors, who respond to feelings of being overwhelmed with simple solution narratives and finger-pointing. Threat scenarios are fuelled by right-wing actors via social media and an alleged culprit is identified as an ‘enemy’ that needs to be confronted to improve one’s own situation and prevent worse things from happening. Politicians are increasingly becoming the enemy, as they are the ones who have had to make difficult political decisions in the context of the coronavirus pandemic or refugee crisis. It often becomes less abstract and more personal when local politicians, for example, are held responsible for a decision to open a new refugee centre in their community. The head of the Federal Criminal Police Office recently said commented recently about the politics of right-wing parties that employ such enemy stereotypes: ‘Every political actor who does not contribute to an objective discourse but instead creates scapegoats – the keywords being ‘foreigner problem’ and ‘remigration’ – contributes to this polarisation.’
Echo chambers on social media and a continuous stylisation of scapegoats can cause individuals to see verbal and, in the worst cases, physical violence as a legitimate or even necessary means of resistance or change. How people become radicalised in this way is a complex and non-linear process, but when it leads to violence against politicians, it is essentially based on such enemy images. The aim is then rarely to harm a particular person. On the contrary, as with many acts of violence and especially those that are categorised as extremist, these are signal acts against representatives of a hated political system that are also intended to intimidate others. However complex the individual process leading to violence may be, it usually begins with feelings of powerlessness, which make people susceptible to scapegoating narratives and can lead in one way or another to the conviction that action must be taken against those people, in the case of violence against politicians either individual culprits or abstract representatives of the system (for literature on this topic, see for example Berger 2018, Mølmen and Ravndal 2021 or Herath and Whittaker 2021).
The next VORTEX blog post in October will focus on the consequences of these developments that endanger democracy and describe what measures have already been taken in Germany to counter this phenomenon both preventively and repressively as well as to support those affected.