German ex-finance minister pelted with shaving cream at campaign stop #NewsGerman

Former German finance minister Christian Lindner was pelted with foam by a protester during a campaign appearance for his pro-business liberal Free Democrats (FDP) on Thursday.

Lindner was hit in the face by what appeared to be a pie made from shaving foam, according to several videos of the incident posted online, including by Lindner on the social media platform X.

The woman throwing the pie, a 34-year-old local politician for the left-wing Left Party, is being investigated on suspicion of assault and insult, a police spokesman told dpa.

The foam pie was labelled “For the love of freedom.”

Lindner tasted the substance and continued his speech, while his security staff wrestled the woman to the floor.

“Unfortunately it wasn’t cream, it was just soap,” Lindner joked while wiping his face. “At least they could have done that better, then I would have got something out of it.”

The former finance minister had spoken in front of several people in a small hall at the constituency event in the north-eastern university town of Greifswald.

The woman said “Dear Mr Lindner” before throwing the pie directly into his face from a short distance. Lindner himself smeared some of the foam back into the woman’s hair.

Left Party state leader Hennis Herbst identified the suspected pie-thrower to dpa as Christiane Kiesow, a member of the party’s executive leadership for the district that includes Greifswald.

Herbst decried the incident and said the Left Party distances itself from such actions.

An FDP spokeswoman denounced the incident as an unacceptable assault.

Lindner carried on with his schedule of campaign events on Thursday as planned, including an election rally in the nearby Baltic Sea port city of Rostock that drew several hundred people.

Lindner, whose sacking by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in November brought down the country’s fractious three-party governing coalition, is seeking to buoy the fortunes of the FDP ahead of the February 23 early nationwide election.

The FDP has been struggling in opinion polls, which show support for the party hovering around the 5% threshold generally needed to take seats in German parliament.

In Rostock, Lindner commented on the pie incident with just one sentence: “Nothing upsets me.”

He also warned that German politics must never become as bitterly polarized as in the United States.

Lindner also welcomed another politician from the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, to the event: “The fact that we can come together as democrats in a parliamentary election campaign and we listen to the arguments of others, even if we don’t share them – that’s a sign of the political culture of our democracy.”

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats and the frontrunner to replace Scholz after the upcoming election, condemned the incident.

“This gives a foretaste of what we may yet experience here in this election campaign,” Merz said at event with journalists in Hamburg on Thursday.

Merz warned that a willingness to escalate political disputes seems to be increasing in parts of the population, and brings a growing danger of violence.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, a member of Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats, also condemned the pie-throwing incident and urged consequences for the woman.

“It starts with the cake and ends with stones or explosives,” Lauterbach said at an event in Cologne. “We must not accept this. Brutalizing the political process damages democracy. That is why it must be punished, it is not a trivial offence.”

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a top politician for the Greens, said in a post on X that “violent attacks of any kind have no place in the struggle for the best solutions for this country!”