ExtremismDon't Ignore Far-Left Extremists Even as Far-Right Violence Is Rising: German Police

New Year’s violence between left-wing extremists and police in the eastern Germany city of Leipzig has created a heated political debate. Attacks on police officers have increased in recent years, but police unions have said the violence has “a new quality.”

“This act shows that inhuman violence also comes from the left-wing extremist scene,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told the dpa news agency on Thursday, before adding that a strong state needed a strong police force.

Leipzig Mayor Burkhard Jung, a Social Democrat who has faced criticism from right-wing parties in the past for failing to crack down on the city’s left-wing extremists, agreed: “The New Year, unfortunately, did not begin peacefully at all, but started with a serious criminal outbreak of violence,” Jung told dpa. “My thoughts are with the injured policeman and his family, and I wish him a speedy recovery.”

DW reports that a 38-year-old police officer was rushed to the hospital after being attacked in the city’s Connewitz district, where members of far-left movements spend time in cafes and clubs.

A police statement released in the early hours of New Year’s Day said a group of people pushed a burning shopping cart into a group of police just after midnight then bombarded the officers with fireworks.

Ten people were arrested at the scene.

Left-leaning politicians were quick to blame police tactics for the outbreak of violence. Juliane Nagel, a socialist Left party representative in the Saxon parliament, who was in Connewitz on New Year’s Eve, published a blog post on Wednesday describing how police officers charged the crowds and injured people.

Nagel also insisted that police actions, while open to criticism, did not justify violence against the authorities.  Germany’s two major police unions echoed this sentiment.

“There is no justification for someone whose job it is to protect public safety to have fireworks and bottles thrown at them,” said Jörg Radek, deputy leader of the GdP police union.

Germany’s latest police crime statistics, released in April last year, showed a 40 percent increase in attacks against police officers, though the police says the increase is partly due to the creation of new crime categories. “We have an average we have 32 attacks on police officers per day,” Radek told DW, adding that the attacks usually aren’t carried out by extremists. “We’re talking about someone being asked for their ID, and instead punching the officer.”

Meanwhile, Rainer Wendt, head of the German police union DPolG, found even stronger words to describe the violence in Leipzig.

“The basic definition of terrorism is spreading fear among the population through violence, and exactly that is happening here,” he told DW. “But this is a new quality: a targeted life-threatening attack on officers, and we have to assume, unfortunately, that at some point someone might be killed.”

Experts note that official statistics show that, overall, far-left violence in Germany is less of a threat than far-right violence. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said there are around 9,000 “violence-orientated” left-wing extremists and just over 12,000 right-wing extremists active in Germany.

The state of Saxony, where Leipzig is located, has been the center of extremist violence on both sides. In November, the the Saxony government formed a new Soko LinX (short for Sonderkommission Linksextremismus, or Special Commission on Left-Wing Extremism), a police special unit focused on left-wing violence. The unit was created after a series of arson attacks on construction sites and businesses in Leipzig.

Wendt also argued that the left-wing “centers” — typically groups of squatters in abandoned buildings and communes populated by left-wingers who come from other parts of Germany — should be broken up because they were places where violent acts were being “planned.”

“We can only praise Saxony that it has put this phenomenon onto this level,” Wendt told DW. “It is right and important to fight far-right extremism with all means, but that doesn’t mean we should disregard the left.”