Just a few events from the past year: FvD leader Thierry Baudet is hit with an umbrella, German politicians are beaten while putting up election posters, and US presidential candidate Donald Trump narrowly escapes death when a bullet grazes his ear. In all three cases, the attackers are civilians who resort to political violence.
Why do people do this? Is it their fault: they are radicalized? Is it society’s fault: is it polarized? Is it the state of democracy? Is it so deplorable that violence is needed to correct it? Is it the political class: is it fanning the flames?
Jonathan van ‘t Riet avoids generalisations. The US is a very different story from Europe. And even within Europe, each country has its own political culture. “France has a tradition of violent protests – look at the riots over lowering the retirement age. Germany has a problem with the far right. But overall the mood in Europe is grim.”
Tolerance of political violence
Van ‘t Riet conducts research at Radboud University’s Institute for Behavioural Sciences on tolerance for political violence in the Netherlands. A fifth of the people she surveyed in 2021 thought the threat to straighten out a politician who is “destroying the country” was justified. And in new research, not yet published, a quarter think that’s OK. To the far more radical claim that some problems citizens have with the government could be solved “with a few well-aimed bullets,” 1.9 percent agreed in 2021 and in the latest survey that’s 4.8 percent.
These are high numbers, says Van ‘t Riet. “Not all of these people are prepared to go to The Hague with pitchforks, though. And support for this last statement is not equivalent to support for political murder,” he adds. But these people do not categorically reject violence against politicians.
Who are they? They are more often men, more often young and more often struggling to make ends meet with their money. What they share most, says the researcher, is mistrust, the idea that things are happening that are not right. “I suspect that some of them feel that using violence is the only way to be heard,” says Van ‘t Riet.
Between wars
Over the past six or seven years, the idea that European democracies are so deeply rooted that they have little to fear has weakened, says Nils-Christian Bormann, a professor at Germany’s Witten/Herdecke University. “Something is brewing.” This is partly due to political violence, such as the murder of British politician Jo Cox, who spoke out against Brexit, and German politician Walter Lübcke, who spoke out in favour of setting up a centre for asylum seekers, Bormann says.
It’s not that there is more violence now than in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the bombings and kidnappings by the radical left-wing Red Brigades and the RAF, the IRA separatists and radicalised youth from the former East Germany using baseball. Bats chased immigrants. Today we are no longer used to this kind of violence, so we are more likely to be surprised by violence, says Bormann. “And then there’s the added bonus: social media makes everything explode to unprecedented proportions.”
Bormann leads the research project Democracy, Anger and Elite Responses, abbreviated: Danger, which examines whether lessons can be learned from the Interbellum, the period between the two world wars when political violence took off. “We don’t have any answers yet.” Observations from the present.
This polarises the debate, Bormann notes, while people, if asked, are not so in disagreement about LGBTI+ equality, the threat of the climate crisis and even the inevitability of some migrations. She thinks that a small thing can generate big words and intense emotions because people follow the lead of political leaders. “It hardens the tone.”
Tone matters
Tone matters, says Van ‘t Riet. People who hear militant language during the experiments – ‘We’re going to fight!’, ‘We have to fight!’ – become more militant. “Politicians have a responsibility to overcome divisions.”
One big difference from the Interbellum, says Bormann, is that political violence now seems to come from solitary individuals. Sometimes they are confused, sometimes they are committed to an ideology, sometimes they feel deprived. There are no political parties that, as then, have a militant wing intent on destabilizing society by force.
But perhaps things work differently in the 21st century. Bormann: “There are many things that escape our observation. Perhaps politicians use social media to encourage people to use violence or intimidate their opponents. What is being said in all those Telegram chats? We don’t know.”
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