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A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in the German state of Saxony, after an attack left a center-left member of the European Parliament in need of surgery, according to media reports.
Matthias Ecke, 41, was ‘seriously injured’ Friday evening after being assaulted by four young men in the city of Dresden while putting up campaign posters, according to a press release issued by his party Saturday.
Ecke is the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) top candidate in Saxony for June’s European Parliament election.
The teenager reported to police in Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician,” the police said in a statement. The 17-year-old did not provide any detailed information, according to the media outlet Der Spiegel.
The SPD has blamed supporters of the far-right party Alliance for Germany (AfD) for the attack on Ecke. “Their supporters are now completely disinhibited and apparently see us democrats as fair game,” the statement on Saturday said. Saxony is one of the AfD’s political strongholds.
On Saturday, the police had spoken of four suspects estimated to be between the ages of 17 and 20. The investigation into the other suspects is ongoing.
Anti-far-right protests have been called for Sunday in Berlin and Dresden.
“Democracy is threatened by this kind of act,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also a member of the SPD, said Saturday, speaking a congress of European socialist parties in Berlin. He said such attacks result from “discourse, the atmosphere created from pitting people against each other.”
Ecke is only the most high-profile victim of violence. On Friday, a campaign worker for the Greens, who was also putting up posters, was attacked by a group of four people, according to the police.
Last week, two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.
According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.
