For the second time in a month, a far-right sympathizer has been sentenced in Germany to life imprisonment.
After the sentence imposed on December 21 on Stefan Balliet, guilty of attacking a synagogue and an oriental restaurant in Halle, killing three people, the murderer of a promigrant CDU mayor, Walter Lübcke, was sentenced Thursday to the same sentence, pronounced by the Frankfurt court and accompanied by a safety period of fifteen years.
Stephan Ernst, 47, had, on June 2, 2019, shot at point blank range on the elected official from Cassel (Land of Hesse) while the latter was taking the cool on his terrace.
The affair had deeply shaken the country, awakening the specter of far-right violence.
For the first time since 1945, a German elected official was assassinated for his political convictions.
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His guilt was not difficult to establish.
Stefan Ernst apologized to Walter Lübcke's family, deeming his act
"cruel and cowardly"
.
He had been known since the 1980s for his profile as a violent neo-Nazi.
In 1989, he tried to burn down the house of a Turkish family, then planned a bomb attack on a hostel for asylum seekers in 1993. In 2009, he took part in a racist riot in Dortmund, before being involved in a 2016 knife attack on an Iraqi refugee.
Angela Merkel's call in 2015 to massively welcome refugees (nearly a million in the space of a year) had fueled her xenophobic resentments.
Failure of the authorities
During a public meeting in Cassel, heckled by the far right, Mayor Walter Lübcke had given his support to the Chancellor's immigration policy.
The event, in which Stefan Ernst participated, would have precipitated his passage into action.
A friend of his, who worked in the same company and was his companion at the shooting club, had helped him get some guns.
Markus Hartmann, who participated in the famous meeting, was sentenced to only one and a half years of suspended imprisonment, for the sole count of possession of prohibited weapons.
At the start of the trial, Stefan Ernst tried to charge his former friend in order to alleviate his sentence.
Although informed of his dangerousness, the police had neglected to report his profile to the authority responsible for issuing permits to carry weapons.
In recent years, the intelligence services had stopped monitoring him.
The failure of the police authorities, whose ramifications with the far-right nebula are widely suspected, was also singled out during Stefan Balliet's trial: the anti-Semitic and xenophobic attacker had carried out his act in Halle in October 2019. Since then , fears of a return of brown terrorism in Germany have been confirmed.
In February 2020, in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Tobias R, 43, killed nine people of foreign origin before committing suicide.
Like Stephan Ernst, this lonely man believed that foreigners tainted the
“purity of the German people”
.
Finally, Germany is facing the development of neo-Nazi nuclei within its armed forces.
Political parties welcomed the
"clear message"
sent by the Frankfurt court.
The Greens have nevertheless condemned the abandonment of the prosecution for complicity against the co-accused Markus Hartmann.
"It would be disastrous if the network and support structures were neglected,"
said MP Konstantin von Notz.
As for the anti-migrant party, the AfD, it is readily accused of
"complicity"
in this murder.
Threatened by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the party has just excluded a former neo-Nazi activist from its list.
Described by some experts as an
"ex-traveling companion"
of Stefan Ernst, the person, Christian Wenzel, was campaigning for the next municipal elections ... in Cassel.
