A candidate for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been stabbed in the south-west German city of Mannheim, less than a week after a police officer was killed and five others were injured in a knife attack in the city.
The attack, which took place on Tuesday evening but was only confirmed by police on Wednesday, left a man with non-life threatening injuries for which he is being treated in hospital.
While officials have not confirmed the victim’s identity, party members identified him as Heinrich Koch, the party’s local council candidate.
The stabbing reportedly occurred 5 miles (8km) from the market square where Friday’s attack took place, in the district of Rheinau.
According to witnesses who spoke to local media, Koch was attacked after confronting a group of people who were tearing down party posters put up as part of local and European elections taking place on Sunday. The AfD member was then reportedly attacked in the stomach with a carpet knife.
Mannheim police said they would make more details public during the day, but confirmed that the attacker had been arrested.
According to Rüdiger Ernst, the local head of the party, Koch is expected to be discharged from hospital on Wednesday. He described the attacker as a “leftwing extremist”, but there is no official confirmation of this.
The regional chair of the AfD, Markus Frohnmaier, said that the party was “horrified and distressed” by the incident.
Last Friday, a 25-year-old Afghan man whose claim for asylum had been turned down a decade previously, stabbed several members of a group of self-proclaimed opponents of political Islam.
A 29-year-old policeman who intervened to try to prevent him, was stabbed and fatally wounded.
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Among the wounded was Michael Stürzenberger, the leader of the group Pax Europa, who is still reportedly being treated in hospital. The attacker is also still in hospital.
In Germany the European election campaign has been febrile and marked by sporadic violence against candidates. In May the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, vowed to fight a surge in violence against politicians after Matthias Ecke, a member of the European parliament, had to be taken to hospital after an attack while he was campaigning for re-election.
Shortly before that, a 28-year-old campaigner for the Greens, who was putting up posters, was also attacked, police said. Franziska Giffey, a former Berlin mayor, was attacked last month at an event at a Berlin library by a man who approached her from behind and hit her with a bag containing an unidentified hard object.