Updated July 17, 2024 at 10:21 AM ET
There has been condemnation from leaders across the world of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., over the weekend. There were also warnings that the United States must do more to prevent political violence.
They have a point. There have been high-profile politically motivated shootings, including President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, President Ronald Reagan and others stretching back to President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
World leaders may wag a finger at the gun culture in the U.S. and the violence it sows, but many other democracies are not immune political extremism.
Just a few recent examples — Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was campaigning for reelection in mid-May when a gunman opened fire on him. Fico, a populist and controversial figure, survived. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right Brazilian politician, was stabbed during a campaign rally in Juiz de Fora. He survived and went on to win the presidential election. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead in 2022 while giving a speech.
Politically motivated attacks like this are becoming more common, says Rachel Kleinfeld, who specializes in democracies and political violence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“We are seeing an increase in violence of all sorts around the world and in democracies,” she says. “We are seeing increased assassination attempts and threats and other forms of intimidation of public officials.”
Kleinfeld says the increase in political violence often charts the rise of populist leaders.
“It's important to understand that the rise of politicians who aggrandize violence, which is happening in many countries, often they're calling for violence against immigrants in parts of Europe or against violence against particular minority groups, for instance, in India, against Muslims,” she said in a veiled reference to India’s hardline Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London, says political polarization began taking hold in Europe about a decade ago, leading to harsher rhetoric among politicians.
“And that's always been led to some extent by right wing populist parties popping up and suddenly no longer obeying by the rules of the game,” he says. “No longer being polite and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of discourse, pushing the boundaries of in terms of very militant language that is being employed.”
Carnegie’s Kleinfeld says social media also has a powerful role in the rise of political extremism that transcends international borders.
“The social media companies are being tremendously irresponsible in pretending they have no role in the rise in violence globally,” she says. “There is absolutely a strong correlation between violent threats online and what we're seeing offline.”
The threat of an attack affects how politicians do their jobs, says Harriet Harman, who was a Labour Party member of Parliament in the U.K. for more than four decades before leaving office in July. She says two of her fellow lawmakers were killed over the past decade and another one's office was firebombed. Harman says now some politicians are afraid to speak out, including in parliament because of threats.
"MPs [members of Parliament] have said to me, I would have spoken in that debate, but I just could not bear the threats that I knew that would come if I spoke,” she says, adding they instead preferred to abstain. “Now, if MPs are changing the way they debate and the way they vote because of threats, then that is absolutely fundamental undermining of our democracy.”
Harman says she used to wander through her constituency to meet people, hear what they had to say.
“I wouldn't dream of doing that now because it would immediately be on social media and then I would be at risk,” she says.
While violence and threats are rising in many countries, Carnegie’s Kleinfeld says the U.S. is still in a category of its own.
“We're seeing threats against members of Congress have risen tenfold since 2016,” she says. “We're seeing threats against election officials, school board officials, mayors in big cities.”
Neumann, with King's College London, says the question now is whether the assassination attempt on Trump will spark security incidents elsewhere in the world.
Copyright 2024 NPR
