An angry anti-fascist activist threw a creamy chocolate cake at a top official of Germany’s Left Party at a party congress. The activist says the action was prompted by the politician’s anti-refugee stance.
Sahra Wagenknecht, an outspoken leader of Die Linke’s parliamentary faction, was targeted by an activist who threw a chocolate cake at her face during the party convention in the city of Magdeburg on Saturday.
The cake attack was reinforced by other protesters throwing leaflets all over the place. A security detail took them away, while Wagenknecht was quickly surrounded by fellow party members, who covered her with their jackets in front of the cameras and escorted the MP out of the hall.
“This is an assault not only on Sahra, but an assault on us all,” Die Linke’s party chief Katja Kipping told the convention shortly after the cake attack.
Gregor Gysi, another party heavyweight, wrote on his Facebook that “whoever throws cakes has no arguments,” before adding that actions such as this “have never happened to our party congresses before and must be ruled out in future.”
Surprisingly, the assault was not orchestrated by the far-right, as it might seem at a glance. The leaflets were signed by an “Anti-fascist cake initiative for the misanthropes,” and equated the left leader Wagenknecht to the rightwing populist AfD party and anti-immigrant PEGIDA movement.
The “anti-fascists” also accused both Die Linke and AfD, the two implacable political rivals, of playing protest agendas and doing nothing to change things. The leaflets claimed, without reference, that Wagenknecht’s husband, “in 2005 and long before the creation of the AfD,” demanded that native Germans be safeguarded from “foreign workers.”
Wagenknecht appeared before the party members shortly afterwards, met by applause and a standing ovation. “Stupid actions like this will not deter me from being actively engaged into policy-making for the Left Party,” she was quoted as saying by Die Welt newspaper.
Earlier in January, Wagenknecht sparked criticism within her own party after she said that there are “limits to Germany’s capacity” to take refugees. “We can’t take one million or more refugees each year,” she said. The top party leader argued that migrants misuse their rights under what she called the “guest law.”