31 Jul 24 | Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
On 14 February, as the upper echelons of Germany’s Green Party prepared to descend on the south-western town of Biberach for their annual meeting, demonstrators blocked access to the town hall with tractors, paving stones, sandbags and manure.
Things took a more aggressive turn when three police officers were injured by protesters hurling objects. Police intervened with pepper spray and a protester smashed a window of federal minister of agriculture Cem Özdemir’s car. The Green Party cancelled the meeting because of safety concerns.
In the state of Thüringen, 200 farmers and demonstrators attempted to block roads to stop a company visit by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck. They insulted the company’s employees and threatened to hang journalists. A week later, an angry crowd followed and heckled party leader Ricarda Lang in Schorndorf, in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, until police stepped in – then the crowd attacked the officers, injuring some of them.
These attacks were far from isolated incidents. In 2021, the party was the most successful of its kind in Europe and the poster child of the continent’s hopeful environmentalist movement, having joined a government coalition for the first time.
Today, it is coming under attack – verbally and violently – unlike any other party.
According to German parliament figures, 44% of the politically motivated attacks recorded in 2023 targeted Green Party representatives, three times as many as their coalition partners or the opposition.
Early this year, another angry mob prevented Habeck, once one of Germany’s most popular politicians, from getting off a ferry in northern Germany. In September 2023, a man threw a rock at party leaders at a campaign event in Bavaria. And earlier that year, Lang found a gun cartridge in her letterbox.
Violence against MPs and politicians is on the rise across the EU, and in May Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot in an assassination attempt. But in Germany, this violence disproportionately targets Green Party politicians.
Local party members and supporters have refused to join the electoral campaign out of fear, according to Carolin Renner, a local party speaker in Görlitz, a far-right stronghold where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won 32.5% of the vote in the 2021 election.
It’s hard to pin down when the mood began to swing against the Green Party. “I think this hate was always there,” Renner told Index, adding that it might have been when AfD drifted to the far-right around 2015.
But things took a turn for the worse in 2020 and 2021 when Covid restrictions generated massive anti-lockdown movements in Germany. At the end of 2021, the Green Party formed a government coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
“That’s when it really got out of hand,” Renner said. “We had people calling to say they were coming into our office and going to kill us and our families.” People slapped stickers on the doors, others spat on the windows and others glued the building’s doors so members couldn’t get in. “I was handling all the reporting to the police at the time, and I had to file at least one report per week,” she said. “It was pretty bad.”
Since the 2021 election, several political parties have tried to portray the Green Party as an urban elitist movement out of touch with the population. It is a favourite target of the far-right AfD, and its representatives have recently said it was “not surprising” that it was coming under attack.
But other parties have joined in attacking them, too. “It seems that the Greens were identified as the main political opponent by several, very different parties,” said Hannah Schwander, a professor of political sociology and social policy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Markus Söder, the leader of the centre-right Christian Social Union in Bavaria, said the Greens were “the number one party of prohibition”, falsely claiming it planned to ban meat, firecrackers, car washing and balloons. And the far-left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht has branded the Greens “the most dangerous party in the Bundestag”.
Even Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor from coalition partner the SPD, said it “remains a party that likes bans”.
“When you have politicians or the media who take up these narratives, that creates an atmosphere in which it seems legitimate to attack politicians – verbally, at first,” said Schwander. “But as we see now, that translates into action as well.”
The politicians’ rhetoric was accompanied by an onslaught of online campaigns. According to Raquel Miguel, a senior researcher with EU Disinfo Lab – an independent non-profit that gathers intelligence on disinformation campaigns in Europe – Green Party members were the most targeted by hoaxes during the 2021 election year. She said that they exaggerated the party’s inexperience and proposals, falsely claiming the party planned to ban fireworks or family barbecues, for example.
“Online campaigns contributed to stirring up hatred against individuals but also to discrediting and undermining trust in politicians, dehumanising them and making them more susceptible to attacks,” Miguel told Index. “And dehumanising contributes to accepting violence.”
In conspiracy-minded far-right groups congregating on the social messaging platform Telegram, the party was depicted as an enemy trying to “take away your way of life, your steak, the sugar from your coffee”, said Lea Frühwirth, a senior researcher with the non-profit Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy. “What that does psychologically is [make it feel] like an invasion of your personal space.”
The media have reported that the attacks on the Green Party’s annual meeting in Biberach and the heckling of the party’s leader in February originated from conspiratorial Telegram channels.
Violence against the party is on the rise, just as green parties faced the worst losses in the 2024 European Parliament elections. The party’s share in Germany appears to have plummeted since the last elections. However, researchers say that the population has not turned against climate issues. “The data shows that there hasn’t really been a widespread backlash against green policies,” said Jannik Jansen, a policy fellow focusing on social cohesion and just transition policies at the Jacques Delors Centre think-tank within Berlin’s Hertie School, which focuses on governance. Jansen co-authored a recent study of attitudes to climate policy among 15,000 voters in France, Germany and Poland. “The political mainstream hasn’t really shifted in this sense,” he said.
But polarisation and extremism have risen. Schwander said some climate issues had become more politicised, and society in general has become more polarised – although in a peculiar way. “People don’t seem to be more polarised on issues than they were before, but they dislike people who think differently more,” she said.
Political violence has risen considerably. Police recorded 2,790 incidents of physical or verbal violence against elected politicians in 2023 – and the figure has nearly doubled in the last five years. Attacks resulting in physical injury also appear to be on the rise.
Twenty-two politicians have been attacked so far in 2024, compared with 27 for all of 2023, according to federal police.
The number of politically motivated crimes has also risen to record-high levels, driven by a rise in right-wing extremism. According to government figures, the country recorded 60,028 offences in 2023 – the highest level since records began in 2001.
But things appear to be going better in the far-right stronghold of Görlitz. “This year, we only had maybe two or three direct attacks,” said Renner. She said the biggest incident happened during the farmers’ protests that shook Europe in late 2023 and early 2024.
“Shortly before Christmas, someone dumped a big load of horse shit right in front of our door at the Zittau office,” she said, adding that the decrease in attacks might be due to the police being more actively involved.
She said the party had also put in place a safety plan ahead of the European elections, requiring members to move in groups of at least three and sharing the list of party events and members’ whereabouts with the police at all times.
Attacks seem to have spilled over to other parties. In early May, European MP Matthias Ecke, from the SPD, was seriously injured when four young men assaulted him while he put up campaign posters in Dresden. He had to be taken to hospital and required surgery. That same evening, a Green Party campaigner was assaulted in the same area, allegedly by the same group. And a few days later, it was the turn of AfD politician Mario Kumpf, who was attacked in a supermarket.
Renner told Index that someone tore down nearly every party’s electoral posters in the northern part of the Görlitz district. “There’s not one poster left except for the far-right,” she said. “It’s not just the Greens anymore – it’s democracy itself that’s being attacked.
20 Dec 23 | Germany, Israel, News and features, Palestine
Since the Hamas’ 7 October terrorist attacks and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, German authorities are using increasingly illiberal measures to curtail pro-Palestine activism. Under the guise of combatting Israel-related antisemitism, civic space for freedom of expression and assembly is shrinking.
The seemingly isolated incidents highlighted in this article are piling up and the curtailing of civic space is starting to be noticed internationally: Civicus, which ranks countries by freedom of expression rights, recently downgraded Germany in a review from "open" to "restricted" due to repression of pro-Palestinian voices, as well as of climate activists.
Stigmatisation of pro-Palestine activism
In her speech celebrating the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel in 2008, former chancellor Angela Merkel referred to the historical responsibility of Germany for the Shoah, including the security of Israel, as part of Germany’s “Staatsräson” (reason for existence). As Hamas has never credibly renounced its goal of destroying Israel, many German policymakers instinctively lean towards near unconditional support for Israel in the face of such adversaries. For them, the 7 October attacks only served to highlight that Germany cannot give an inch to critics of Israel.
There are long-standing disagreements around where to draw the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and attacks on Israel that single it out because it is a Jewish state, are expressed in antisemitic ways or are motivated by antisemitic views. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism acknowledges that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” but identifies seven examples of when attacks on Israel may be antisemitic (taking into account the overall context). For example, it could be antisemitic to reference classic antisemitic tropes such as the blood libel conspiracy myth to describe Israel, deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination or blame Jews collectively for the actions of Israel, according to IHRA.
While Germany has adopted IHRA, much looser standards seem to be applied by authorities and commentators committed to tackling Israel-related antisemitism. Calls for a binational state, advocacy for the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or accusations that Israel is committing Apartheid are regularly identified as antisemitic. There is a strong sense that given its historical responsibility, it is not Germany’s place to judge, or let anyone else judge, Israel even as its offensive in Gaza has resulted in one of the highest rates of death in armed conflict since the beginning of the 21st century, and disproportionately affects civilians.
Against this background, advocacy for Palestinian political self-determination and human rights is cast as suspicious. In the liberal Die Zeit newspaper, journalist Petra Pinzler criticised the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as she “sympathises more and more openly with the Palestinians and thus divides the climate movement.” Apparently sympathy with the Palestinians has become a cause for concern.
The debates since 7 October have created an atmosphere in which pro-Palestinian voices are more and more stigmatised. Pro-Palestinian protests have repeatedly been banned by local authorities. Their dystopian rationale for these bans revolves around the idea that, based on assessments of previous marches, crimes are likely to be committed by protesters. The practice is not new: in the past, German police have even banned protests commemorating the ”Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the collective mass expulsion and displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1947-49 wars following the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine by the United Nations. In reaction to pro-Palestine protests since 7 October, the antisemitism commissioner of North Rhine Westphalia and former federal justice minister even suggested the police should pay closer attention to the nationality of pro-Palestine protest organisers as protests organised by non-Germans could be banned more easily.
Furthermore, pro-Palestinian political symbols are being falsely associated with Hamas or other pro-terrorist organisations. In early November, the Federal Interior Ministry banned the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” as a symbol of both Hamas and Samidoun, a support network for the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.
While one plausible interpretation of the “From the River to the Sea” slogan is that it is a call for the destruction of Israel, it is equally plausible to understand it as a call for a binational state with full equality of all citizens. Without context, the slogan cannot automatically be identified as antisemitic, though it is of course entirely legitimate to criticise this ambivalence. As has been extensively documented, the slogan does not originate with nor is exclusively used by Hamas.
Apart from being based on misinformation, banning "From the River to the Sea" has also created the ludicrous situation that the German police force is asked to make assessments on whether holding a "From the River we do see nothing like equality" placard is an expression of support for terrorism. A former advisor to Angela Merkel even called for the German citizenship of a previously stateless Palestinian woman to be revoked who posted a similar slogan ("From the River to the Sea #FreePalestine") on her Instagram.
In some cases, these dynamics venture into the absurd. On 14 October, the activist Iris Hefets was temporarily detained in Berlin for holding a placard that read: “As a Jew & an Israeli Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
These illiberal and ill-conceived measures are not limited to protests. In response to the 7 October attacks, authorities in Berlin allowed schools to ban students from wearing keffiyeh scarves to not “endanger school peace”.
Curtailing civic spaces
While these trends have been accelerated since 7 October, they predate it. In 2019, the German Bundestag passed a resolution that condemned the BDS movement as antisemitic. It referenced the aforementioned IHRA definition of antisemitism (which does not comment on boycotts), compared the BDS campaign to the Nazi boycotts of Jewish business and called on authorities to no longer fund groups or individuals that support BDS.
BDS calls for the boycott of Israeli goods, divestment from companies involved in the occupation of Arab territories and sanctions to force the Israeli government to comply with international law and respect the rights of Palestinians, including the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Inspired by the boycott campaign against Apartheid South Africa, BDS has attracted many supporters, but critics have claimed that BDS singles out Israel and delegitimises its existence. Accusations of antisemitism within the movement should of course be taken seriously: BDS supporters have previously been accused of employing antisemitic rhetoric about malign Jewish influence and intimidating Jewish students on campus. However, many of BDS’ core demands are clearly not antisemitic. Since the BDS lacks a central leadership that would issue official stances, it is difficult to make blanket statements about the movement in its entirety.
The 2019 resolution is now being cited to shut down cultural events. A planned exhibition in Essen on Afrofuturism was cancelled over social media posts that, according to the museum, “do not acknowledge the terroristic attack of the Hamas and consider the Israeli military operation in Gaza a genocide” and expressed support for BDS. The Frankfurt book fair “indefinitely postponed” a literary prize for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli, after one member of the jury resigned due to supposed anti-Israel and antisemitic themes in her book. Shibli has since been accused by the left-wing Taz newspaper of being an “engaged BDS supporter” for having signed one BDS letter in 2007 and a 2019 letter that criticised the city of Dortmund for revoking another literary price for an author that supports BDS. A presentation by the award-winning Forensic Architecture research group at Goldsmiths (University of London), which has analysed human rights abuses in Syria, Venezuela and Palestine as well as Neo-Nazi murders in Germany, was likewise cancelled by the University of Aachen which cited the group’s founder Eyal Weizman’s support for BDS.
The curtailing of civic space increasingly affects voices that have stood up for human rights at great personal risk. The Syrian opposition activist Wafa Ali Mustafa was detained by Berlin police near a pro-Palestine protest, reportedly for wearing a keffiyeh scarf. Similarly, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, which is associated with the centre-left Green Party, pulled out of the Hannah Arendt prize ceremony, which was due to be awarded to the renowned Russian dissident, philosopher and human rights advocate Masha Gessen. Despite acknowledging differences between the two, Gessen had compared Gaza to the Jewish ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Europe in an article about the politics of memory in Germany, the Soviet Union, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and Israel.
Conversation stoppers
Alarm bells should ring as one of Europe’s major liberal democracies has taken an authoritarian turn in the aftermath of 7 October. Germany’s noble commitment to its historical responsibility in the face of rising antisemitism is morphing into a suppression of voices advocating for Palestinian political self-determination and human rights.
In this distorted reality, civic spaces are eroded, cultural symbols banned, political symbols falsely conflated with support for terrorism and events are shut down. So far, there has been little pushback or critical debate about these worrying developments. To the contrary: politicians, foundations, cultural institutions and media outlets seem to be closing ranks under the shadow of the 2019 BDS resolution and a skewed interpretation of the IHRA definition.
Following the appalling violence committed by Hamas on 7 October, and the scale of civilian suffering in Gaza due to the subsequent Israeli military offensive, polarisation and tension between communities have been on the rise. In this context, it is crucial to be able to have passionate, empathetic, controversial and nuanced discussions about the conflict, its history, the present impasse, potential ways forward and its impact on Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities abroad. With the voices of activists, authors and even internationally renowned human rights advocates being increasingly isolated, these vital exchanges are prevented from taking place.
