The increasing violence against politicians is an attack on democracy itself | Simon Tisdall

TThe response of Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s centre-left prime minister, to the physical attack on a Copenhagen street was dignified and very human. “I am not well and I am not quite myself yet,” she admitted last week. The attack, which left her with serious injuries, left her shocked and intimidated, she said.

Frederiksen said her experience was the culmination of some well-known trends: increasing threats on social media, increasingly aggressive political discourse, a divisive war in the Middle East. “As a human being, it feels like an attack on me. But I have no doubt that it was the prime minister who was hit. In that way, it becomes a kind of attack on all of us.”

There is ample evidence to support the idea that elected politicians – and the democracies they represent – ​​are everywhere at risk from increasing personalized violence.

With contentious elections looming in France, the UK and the US, it is all too likely that there will be further outbreaks of violence and more casualties, possibly including prominent figures. The causes of this phenomenon include anger and distrust of the “ruling elites”, targeted polarisation and fear-mongering, anti-migrant racism, sectarian fanaticism, economic hardship and digital provocations by malign state actors. But there is no obvious pattern. Political violence, which is mostly random, comes from both the right and the left.

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s right-wing populist prime minister, was shot multiple times last month and luckily survived. He believes he was attacked because of his views and blames the influence of political opponents on the left. “It is obvious that he (Fico’s attacker) was just a messenger of evil and political hatred,” he said.

In Germany, the tables have turned, following a series of attacks by far-right thugs reminiscent of the Nazi era. In May, Matthias Ecke, a Social Democratic MEP, was brutally beaten in Dresden. On the same evening, a Green Party campaign manager was also attacked in the city.

The infamous murder of Walter Lübcke, a centrist politician, by a neo-Nazi in 2019 now appears to be a turning point. Since then, attacks in Germany have doubled. Preliminary figures show that there were 234 physical attacks on politicians and political activists last year. “We are witnessing an escalation of anti-democratic violence,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.

It would be easy to blame the divisive policies and rhetoric of Germany’s growing far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and many do. Yet AfD members were victims of more violent criminal attacks than any other party in 2023, mostly by people with left-wing ideology. The Greens were the second biggest victims.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision last week to challenge the far right in early parliamentary elections, which will be held in two rounds on June 30 and July 7, is a major political gamble. But it could also prove to be a personal gamble. Macron has been attacked with eggs, tomatoes and various vegetables in previous election campaigns. In 2021, he received a slap in the face.

The potential risks for him and other French politicians in the current climate are obvious but difficult to combat. “Right-wing extremist violence – motivated by nationalism and authoritarianism – is on the rise in France,” warned University of Oslo extremism expert Anders Ravik Jupskas in an article in The World.

Like democratic politicians elsewhere, the unpopular Macron is risking his life when he campaigns. This is simply dangerous, and raises fundamental questions about how long this kind of face-to-face politics can realistically continue. It is notable that authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, while claiming to be popular, rarely present themselves to the public in this way.

Similar fears are also being expressed in the UK, where memories of the murders of Labour MP Jo Cox and Conservative MP David Amess by extremists are still fresh. Last week, the Jo Cox Foundation also condemned two attacks on the far-right leader of the Reform UK party, Nigel Farage. One of the attacks was carried out with a milkshake, the other with a takeaway cup.

Who knows what will happen next, and to whom? The more irresponsible English tend to regard such incidents as harmless banter. This attitude goes back at least to the 1970 election, when Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was repeatedly pelted with eggs at public meetings, to the general amusement of the irreverent nation.

British politics is less innocent and more dangerous these days. Rosie Duffield, a Labour candidate, revealed last week that she had spent £2,000 of her own money on bodyguards after receiving death threats. Now she has pulled out of local campaign events. There are particular concerns about the safety of female politicians such as the much-maligned Diane Abbott, but individual security protection is not usually provided.

In this alarming context, Conservative minister Michael Gove’s clumsy attempts to define and ban extremism seem irrelevant given the flood of public abuse about Gaza. A more pressing question, for example, is how well protected is Keir Starmer, Britain’s likely next prime minister, from non-terrorist, right-wing political violence?

The debate continues over whether political violence comes predominantly from the far right or the far left. In some ways, this is an academic question. What is immediately worrying is that everywhere in the democratic world, or so it seems, conventional politics is in danger of collapsing under the weight of violence – verbal, virtual, digital and physical. Defenses against it seem thin or nonexistent.

Given America’s role as a democratic paradigm after 1945, the likely resurrection this fall of Donald Trump – a man who normalizes violence on a daily basis – could make a bad problem much worse. Trump’s instrumentalization of state power is uniquely damaging to trust, tolerance, and peaceful change.

But in reality most governments are deeply divided. Like its US counterpart, the British state has often given the impression – in crushing the 1984-85 miners’ strike, protests against the Iraq war and Gaza, and environmental activism – that it is more capable of inflicting political violence on ordinary people than of protecting them from it.

Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign policy commentator