SPD politician Matthias Ecke returns to the election campaign after attack

One week after the attack on SPD politician Matthias Ecke, he has announced that he will soon return to the election campaign. "I will not let the attack silence me," Ecke told the "Freie Presse", the "Leipziger Volkszeitung" and the "Sächsische Zeitung" in a joint interview on Friday. "I am affected, but not intimidated." If the healing process allows it, he wants to attend individual appointments from next week. He is also not worried about his party.

"I'm getting better day by day," Ecke told the newspapers, but he is still in pain. "I don't have a feeling of limited security at the moment. Nevertheless, I have to see how I cope with the experience in the medium term." The Saxon SPD European leadership candidate was beaten up last Friday in Dresden while putting up posters. He suffered broken bones in his face.

The attack was sudden, Ecke told the newspapers, "a matter of a few seconds". He had been provocatively asked why he was putting up an SPD poster, and then the punch came. "People have taken the social climate, which is becoming increasingly harsh, as an opportunity for vigilante justice."

He feels reminded of the 1990s, said Ecke. "Back then, there were also spaces of fear created by neo-Nazis. Old acquaintances from back then and party friends felt the same way. Even the staff in the emergency room on Friday were talking about the same thing." The AfD has poisoned the social climate in recent years. "We are dealing with a manufactured disinhibition and an organized brutalization that the AfD is creating together with other structures of the extreme right." He is thinking of the Free Saxons and the Identitarian movement. This level of brutalization has never been seen before in election campaigns.