When the Hamburg SPD politician Olcay Aydik, 26 – who describes himself as a “lawyer and working-class child” – wanted to put up his election posters in Hamm again on Sunday morning, which someone had torn down the night before, he had no idea that he would have to do so in the coming days will make a lot of phone calls: at that moment all he cares about is being first. The locations around the Hammer weekly market are important; there is a “small battle for space” for the best poster locations, as he says in an interview with MOPO.
And that’s why Aydik wants to quickly put the posters back in their place before a competitor snatches the place away from him. As he grabbed one of his posters, “I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my middle finger. At first I thought it must have been a chip of wood.”
But it wasn’t a harmless mishap that happened to him: “A razor blade was attached to the back with an adhesive tape.” Aydik explains that he was lucky that he only cut his middle finger: if he had gripped the prepared poster differently, “A tendon could have been severed without any problems.”
So it remains a bleeding wound and a shock at the further brutalization – although razor blades are not a completely new phenomenon for the experienced election campaigner, who has been putting up posters, fighting for votes and dealing with people both friendly and hostile to the SPD for ten years : Right-wing organizations have been sticking stickers on posters with razor blades behind them for a long time: “The calculation is that you will cut yourself when you take them off.”
Aydik’s party friend and mayor Carola Veit is also horrified by the current development. On Instagram she posts a picture of an election poster that was not torn down or stuck on, but set on fire and writes: “Anyone who physically attacks election campaigners or destroys their campaign material is putting themselves on the same level as people who want to abolish our state system. That is not how it works!”
Aydik reported the razor blade trap and state security is investigating. The SPD in Hamm has already adopted stricter rules for the election campaign after the attack on SPD man Matthias Ecke in Dresden: “Before, I walked from door to door alone, that wasn’t a problem at all. Now we won’t do that anymore.” The election campaigners move through their neighborhood in at least two people, and better yet three people. And no posters are put up at night anymore.
By Alexander Josefowicz
The original for this article “Hamburg SPD politician injured by razor blade election poster” comes from Mopo.