German Green politician attacked, slightly injured at campaign event

A Green lawmaker in the German state of Lower Saxony was injured in an attack at a campaign event on Saturday, the police and her party said, adding to a spate of violence against lawmakers of all parties.

Police said a man hit Marie Kollenrott several times on her upper body at the event in city centre of Göttingen. Her injuries were described as minor and located on her arms.

Officers detained the suspected assailant, a 66-year-old man from Göttingen, close to the scene of the incident. State security has taken over the investigation, as is the protocol in such cases.

Kollenrott serves in the parliament of Lower Saxony, in north-western Germany.

"We condemn the assault in the strongest possible terms," said the state's Green Party parliamentary group leader Anne Kura, denouncing it as "an attack on our democracy."

"We are shocked, but we will not be intimidated," she said in a statement

According to initial findings, the man made derogatory remarks about the Greens at an election campaign stand in a pedestrian zone near the Old Town Hall.

Police said there was a brief political discussion with Kollenrott. The man then approached the politician and began punching her.

A series of attacks on politicians and campaign workers in the run up to June's European elections have shocked Germany.

Franziska Giffey, a prominent Berlin state minister and former mayor, who belongs to Scholz's centre-left Social Democrats (SDP), was attacked while visiting a library in the German capital earlier this month.

Bundestag member Matthias Ecke, also from the SPD, was beaten and hospitalized in Dresden at the start of May. Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler was also insulted, threatened and spat at while putting up posters in Dresden a few days later.