Eggs, custard pies, shaving foam, and milkshakes may seem trivial, but those who hurl them at politicians are doing more harm than they realise.
German liberal leader Christian Lindner was hit in the face with a plate of shaving foam at a campaign event last Thursday. Police are investigating a 34-year-old woman on suspicion of assault, according to the German Press Agency, though they released her immediately after taking her details following the attack.
Lindner is hardly the first politician to undergo this indignity, and like most of the others, he remained calm and laughed it off.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t cream; it was just soap,” he said as he wiped the foam off his face. “At least they could have done that better, then I would have got something out of it.”
Such low-level assaults may be designed to humiliate rather than injure, but they signal to extremists and psychopaths everywhere just how easy it is to physically attack politicians. They also blur and trivialise the distinction between speech and violence, which has to be defended vigorously for liberal democracy to work.
The ‘Prescott punch’
Not everyone reacts as calmly as Lindner.
In 2001, a protester smashed an egg onto the British Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott – who immediately spun around and punched him in the face, then deftly countered the egg-thrower’s attempt to hit him back.
Much of the ensuing media coverage was sympathetic to Prescott, acknowledging that he acted in self-defence. He remained in office for another six years.
Ultimately, Prescott too was able to laugh it off: “When I do die, after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales,” Prescott told The Guardian in 2019. He died last year, and footage of the “Prescott punch” duly did the rounds on social media.
Politicians who lack Prescott’s experience as a boxer in the British Merchant Navy may be better advised to follow Lindner’s example.
But while they do well to make light of it publicly, the more sobering question all of them will have to ask themselves is this: “If it’s that easy to throw something in my face, what else might be coming my way?”
The consequence is that politicians will be increasingly less accessible to the public because of justified concerns for their safety.
‘Mock assassinations’
In 2019, there was a spate of milkshake attacks against right-wing figures in Britain, including Nigel Farage.
The fad quickly spread to the US. Few commentators took it seriously. One who did was the American philosopher and podcaster Sam Harris, who argued in May that year: “All these assaults are mock assassinations (whether the perpetrators know it or not).”
The attacks “reveal unavoidable weaknesses in the security of their targets and advertise their vulnerability to the whole world,” said Harris on Twitter, as it was called then. “The result is worse than it appears.”
There’s little reason to read “mock assassinations” as a metaphor.
Two British MPs have been assassinated in recent years: Labour’s Jo Cox and the Conservative Sir David Amess. Their assailants used guns and knives, not milkshakes and shaving foam, but the other circumstances were more-or-less equivalent.
Both were murdered at close range on occasions where they had deliberately made themselves available to the general public.
A neo-Nazi fatally shot and stabbed Cox in 2016 outside a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire. The library was to be the venue for Cox’s regular constituency ‘surgery,’ where members of the public could discuss concerns with their MP privately.
Five years later, an Islamist stabbed Amess to death at his constituency surgery in a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.
Wolfgang Schäuble, one of Lindner’s predecessors as finance minister, was also nearly killed in 1990 when a drug addict shot him three times at a campaign rally, severing Schäuble’s spinal cord and leaving him paraplegic for life.
More cliff edge than slippery slope
Obviously, the contrast between these gruesome murders and the foaming of Lindner is extreme to the point of being grotesque. But if you tolerate the latter, you leave the door wide open to all the horrors of the former.
If that sounds far-fetched to you, then consider the ghoulish discourse surrounding the murder of United Healthcare boss Brian Thompson, who had two children. We’ve already reached the point where such a crime is deemed “acceptable” by a large minority of younger respondents to a recent survey.
Even some professional newspaper columnists were willing to equivocate with oh-so-clever commentary about the problems of America’s health insurance system and the impending return of Donald Trump.
The hackneyed objection that all of this is a slippery-slope argument ignores the cliff edge from which so many of us are already happy to leap.
Roundup
Tech – X owner Elon Musk and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly intervened in European politics last week, overshadowing timid calls from EU politicians that US tech giants must comply with the EU’s digital rules.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week it would phase out fact-checkers to adopt a ‘community notes’ approach, pioneered by X, is not prohibited under EU law.
Energy – A coalition of six northern European countries wants the EU to push for a more severe international price cap on Russian oil within the G7 framework, according to a letter seen by Euractiv.
Russia has succeeded in barring Ukraine from presiding over the 15th annual International Renewables Energy Agency (IRENA) meeting after long threatening to hold up the process with its veto.
EU bubble – Europeans want to make sure they have a seat at the table in any future Ukraine peace talks, but they run the risk of getting only a folding chair.
Across Europe
Germany – Alice Weidel’s election as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) candidate for chancellor this weekend was hardly a surprise. But it did end up exposing the tensions in a party split between its leadership and base.
Austria – Austria’s caretaker Chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, is expected to visit Brussels on Monday to reassure officials here that his country’s likely far-right turn is much ado about nothing.
Serbia – Serbia, an EU candidate country, was the only European country apart from Russia and Belarus to attend the inauguration of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which was boycotted by the vast majority of the international community.
Italy – Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio has blocked the extradition of Iranian national Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi in a case closely linked to the recent release of Italian journalist Cecilia Sala from detention in Tehran.
Agenda
14 January
Executive Vice-President Virkkunen attends the Summit of the Baltic Sea NATO countries.
Executive Vice-President Ribera meets with Environmental Civil Society Organisations.
Commissioner Kos receives Faruk Kaymakci, head of the Turkish Mission to the EU.
Commissioner Tzitzikostas receives the European Authority for Aviation Safety.
Commissioner Dombrovskis meets Minister of Finance of Austria Gunter Mayr.
Commissioner Jørgensen receives Minister of Climate of Estonia Yoko Alender.
Extraordinary AFET Committee meeting to exchange views with Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos.
[Edited by Matthew Karnitschnig/Martina Monti]
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Publish date : 2025-01-13 06:24:00
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