By Holger Mehlig and Jasmin Beisiegel, dpa
DRESDEN – A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police on Sunday following an attack in Dresden on Matthias Ecke, a German member of the European Parliament, during campaign work on Friday evening.
The teen reported to the Dresden-Süd police station early Sunday morning and told officers he had assaulted the politician from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) said.
The investigation is ongoing and police are working to corroborate the teen’s statements, a LKA spokeswoman said.
Ecke was brutally beaten by a gang of four assailants on Friday evening while hanging campaign posters in the eastern German city. He was hospitalized and required surgery.
Witnesses described the assailants as dressed in dark clothing and said they seemed to be part of the far-right extremist scene.
The three other suspects are still unknown, police say. They are believed to be young men between 17 and 20 years old.
Ecke is the SPD’s top candidate in the state of Saxony for June’s European elections. He has served in the European Parliament since 2022.
The attack shocked the country and prompted outrage in Germany, with politicians from a number of different parties decrying the violence and warning of a threat to German democracy.
Minutes before Ecke was attacked, according to the police, a group of four assailants had also assaulted a 28-year-old Green Party campaign worker while he was putting up posters in the same part of Dresden.
Protesters have called for demonstrations in Germany to denounce the attacks and defend Germany’s democratic values.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, meanwhile, has reportedly sought an urgent meeting with her state-level colleagues to address added security measures to prevent further political violence in the lead up to June’s European Parliament elections.
There have been several violent incidents during election campaigns across Germany, including on Thursday evening in the western German city of Essen, where a Green Party member of parliament, Kai Gehring, was attacked along with his fellow Green colleague Rolf Fliss after a party event.
In the western German town of Nordhorn, a politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was beaten at an information stand on Saturday morning, according to police reports.
Two activist groups called for demonstrations on Sunday in both Dresden and Berlin to denounce the violence.
Interior ministers from Germany’s 16 federal states are expected to convene next week to discuss the attacks. Faeser, a fellow member of the SPD, called for the meeting on Saturday, not long after police disclosed details of the assault on Ecke, the Tagesspiegel newspaper reported.
The Greens in the eastern state of Saxony have already reacted after other attacks last weekend in Chemnitz and Zwickau and are no longer sending their members to put up posters on their own. Other parties are now also making similar considerations and guidelines in the wake of the assault on Ecke.
“The constitutional state must and will react to this with a tough approach and further protective measures for the democratic forces in our country,” Faeser said.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green, also condemned the recent attacks on Sunday.
“Brutal attacks on committed democrats, campaigners & politicians are attacks on the foundation of our democracy: free elections,” the minister, currently on a trip to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
“The reports about this are frightening. Violence is never a means of democracy.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for united action against right-wing extremism.
“Democracy is threatened by something like this, and that is why shrugging our shoulders is never an option,” said Scholz on Saturday evening. “We must stand together against it.”
