Annalena Baerbock is defending herself against propagandists from Zurich

It was a single sentence that a person from Zurich addressed to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Now this has costly consequences for him.

The man has to pay a fine of 1800 francs plus 2000 francs decision fees. The Zurich District Court decided on Friday.

The incident happened on October 22, 2021. At 12:57 p.m., the 39-year-old Swiss man pressed the send button in his apartment in Zurich. Seconds later, the e-mail landed in Annalena Baerbock’s inbox in Berlin. The Swiss writes: “Someone should dismember you,” and ends the sentence by calling her a prostitute. The man tries to hide his identity.

In the e-mail he calls himself “papierlischwizer”. Baerbock reports the case to the German public prosecutor. This quickly finds out that the sender is based in Zurich and passes the case on to the Zurich city police. She finds out: The sender is a Swiss-Russian dual citizen who describes himself as a philosopher. The accused has multiple convictions. He is in outpatient treatment for mental health problems. He should therefore soon receive an IV pension.

In the summer he is punished by a penalty order for verbal abuse. The accused contested the penalty order, and so the hearing took place on Friday morning in the Zurich district court.

Of the The 39-year-old appears in court without a defense attorney, but with a stack of papers. They are printed newspaper articles and a neatly noted justification. Because he does not deny that he wrote the email to Baerbock, he says: “My statement is not an insult, but a fact.” He dissects his own statement word for word and tries to justify each word historically. He doesn’t shy away from comparing Baerbock with the National Socialists.

The accused sees himself as a fighter against right-wing extremists. He says: «I am sensitized to Nazis. If Hitler had been killed in time, this catastrophe would not have happened.” Then he adds that Baerbock’s policy is based on warmongering. He means hate speech against the Russian state and President Vladimir Putin.

“She calls the country I come from System Putin. She offended an entire people,” he says. Sometimes his arguments get confused. He talks about green energy from nuclear power, accuses Baerbock of being a CIA agent and claims his cognitive abilities are well above average. The arguments do not convince the judge. Like the lower court, he convicted the man of insults.

After the verdict, the man rushes out of the room and shouts: “You are a scoundrel state.”

Pandemic has changed threat situation

The Baerbock case is an example of a development: Since the beginning of the corona pandemic, insults and threats against politicians have reached a new level: Last year, the Swiss Federal Police (Fedpol) reported 1,215 threats against magistrates. That’s five times as many as before the pandemic.

The development is similar in Germany. Holger Münch, the president of the German Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement last year Interview with the “Spiegel”: “We see with concern that the number of threats and hostilities is steadily increasing. This affects politicians, but also other people such as virologists, who are particularly present in the media during the pandemic. »

The number of unreported threats is likely to be high. Fedpol suspects that only some of the protected persons systematically report threats. “The threat situation has changed in terms of quantity and quality during the pandemic. The protection of personalities today is no longer comparable to the time before the pandemic,” says Fedpol.

In Germany, the non-profit organization Hate Aid has made visible the masses of hate comments that top politicians like Baerbock are exposed to. For a month in 2021, Hate Aid evaluated how often the top candidates were insulted on Twitter in the election campaign for the chancellorship. 524 tweets were directed at Baerbock “in the context of potentially offensive and hurtful language”. This corresponds to a quarter of all messages to Baerbock in this period. The ratios were similar for the male chancellor candidates.

Hate Aid also further investigated the sources of the tweets and found that many of the messages addressed to Baerbock came from right-wing milieus. About a quarter can be assigned to the right to right-wing extremist spectrum.

Another case from Zurich also fits into this pattern: A German resident in Switzerland was fined a conditional fine of 9,000 francs and an unconditional fine of 2,300 francs in September because he had incited violence against Angela Merkel.

Here, too, a complaint was filed in Germany and the case was then forwarded by the German authorities to the Swiss colleagues. The choice of words reveals the extreme right-wing attitude of the sender. He commented on the Facebook page of “ZDF today” under a video with the words “Headshot and it’s good”. In the video, the then German Chancellor informed about the development of the incidence of the new corona variant. The accused accepted the penalty order.

Lea Stahel, sociologist at the University of Zurich, says: “Hate often arises in connection with perceived powerlessness.” However, there are no studies on the concrete reasons for aggressive comments against politicians.

However, according to Stahel, it is clear that the higher the status of a politician, the more likely he or she is to be subjected to hate comments and insults. Gender is often secondary. Studies show that politicians are insulted about as often as women politicians. At least that applies to local politicians. A study from Canada has shown that high-status women like Baerbock are attacked much more often than their male counterparts.

Differences are also found in the content of the insults: women are often insulted in a sexist way – like Baerbock in the case described above. This is less common in men. In addition, women are more often denied competence than men.

When anger and hate increases online, it creates an environment for crime. In 2021, the Federal Police therefore took further measures in 120 cases. For comparison: Two years earlier, this was only necessary in 18 cases.

Not only online, but also face to face, the inhibition threshold for attacks on politicians seems to have fallen during the pandemic. Two examples from Zurich show this.

The SVP government councilor Natalie Rickli was sprayed with apple juice by a man at the inauguration of the cantonal vaccination mobile in August 2021. He was found guilty of violence and threats against authorities and officials and punished with a conditional fine of 6,900 francs.

A case involving city councilor Karin Rykart had far-reaching consequences. In June 2021, she sat with her counterparts Daniel Leupi and Andreas Hauri at lunch in front of the Rüden restaurant on Limmatquai. A cyclist headed for the table and threatened Rykart. You file a complaint. It later emerged during the proceedings that the man, because of schizophrenia, was firmly convinced that the judiciary was conspiring against him and that the police were pursuing him. The perpetrator was ruled innocent by the judges and an inpatient measure, a small detention, was ordered.