Calls for action to protect public servants and defend democracy as far right responds with aggression

If two employees of a kebab shop had not come to the rescue of Andreas Hollstein on the night of 27 November 2017, the mayor of the town of Altena would most likely have become the first German politician to be murdered by a rightwing extremist since the end of the Nazi era.

Instead, the 57-year-old survived with a stab wound to his neck, inflicted with a 34cm (13in) knife by a local man angered by the mayor’s liberal stance during the refugee crisis.

Nineteen months later, another regional politician was less lucky. Walter Lübcke, a member of Angela Merkel’s CDU, was killed with a gunshot to the head on the terrace of his home near Kassel, in the state of Hesse. Neo-Nazi Stephan Ernst has confessed to killing the regional official in an attempt to take “revenge” for his pro-refugee stance. On Tuesday his lawyer Frank Hannig told Bild that “my client retracted his confession today. I won’t say more at the moment.”

One month on from the murder, Hollstein told the Guardian that politicians and authorities in Germany needed to act urgently to protect public servants in rural areas from similar attacks – and to ensure that young people did not avoid politics for fear of risking their lives.

“What we are witnessing is a massive loss of respect for people in public office – not just politicians, but also civil servants, police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers,” said Hollstein, who said he had received four further death threats since Lübcke’s murder.

Hollstein refused police protection and declined to have his contact details removed from the town hall website, arguing that politicians in less densely populated areas had to remain in close contact with the public. “There is no point in a local politician who is no longer accessible to the citizens he or she represents,” he said. But that leaves such politicians particularly vulnerable.

“I think the very first thing we should expect from politicians after the Lübcke murder is stronger instinct to self-regulate their own speeches,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andreas Holstein talks to the media in 2017. Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

Yet one month on from the death of Walter Lübcke, Germany appears only to be slowly starting to wake up to the significance of the tragedy.

On Thursday, 10,000 people took to the streets of Kassel to march against rightwing violence. But similar demonstrations of solidarity have failed to materialise at a nationwide level, in spite of the foreign minister Heiko Maas’s call for a “Thursdays for Democracy” protest similar to the “Fridays for Future” climate change marches.

“Why are the people of my country not flooding to the streets in disgust?” asked columnist Hatice Akyün in Der Tagesspiegel newspaper. “Now, after the death of Walter Lübcke … After death threats against Cologne mayor Henriette Reker and dozens of other politicians.”

In the case of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), aggressive denial has taken the place of quiet reflection or self-restraint.

During a debate in the Bundestag last week, AfD delegate Gottfried Curio said the Lübcke murder was being used to defame “political enemies”, while his party colleague Martin Hess complained that other parties were waging a “campaign of annihilation” against the AfD.

In the Bavarian parliament, one AfD politician refused to stand for a minute’s silence in Lübcke’s honour, while the state parliament in Stuttgart saw the party’s Wolfgang Gedeon dismiss far-right terrorism as “bird shit” compared to the threat posed by the far left and radical Islamists.

Another AfD politician went as far as blaming Germany’s leader for the death of her colleague. “If there had been no illegal opening of borders through Chancellor Angela Merkel,” said Martin Hohmann in a press release, “then Walter Lübcke would still be alive.”

After the British Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a man with far-right sympathies shortly before the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, parliament was recalled to hear tributes, a fund established to further the causes she had cared about, and a memorial event organised on Trafalgar Square. Yet predictions that the tragedy would change the tone of the political debate proved untrue.

Among the liberal wing of Merkel’s CDU, there is optimism that the murder of Lübcke, a lawmaker with little name recognition outside the state of Hesse, could have a more lasting effect on Germany’s political direction.

After the killing, the CDU party leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, said that any politician who harboured hopes that her party might enter a coalition government with the AfD in the future “should close their eyes and think of Walter Lübcke”. She said: “Every CDU member who talks or dreams [of a coalition with the AfD] has personally to ask themselves how they can square it with their conscience.”

Peter Tauber, a CDU secretary general until 2017, said the right wing of his party had facilitated the rise of the AfD by being “unwilling to admit that the political right cannot be integrated or tied to us”.

“The enemy is standing there – and there is no doubt – he is standing to our right,” Tauber wrote in an opinion article for Die Welt.

Ruprecht Polenz, another former CDU general secretary, said Lübcke’s killing had triggered an intense debate among his party’s voters about the roots of radicalisation.

“The idea that the CDU can win back voters by tacking right and imitating the AfD is off the table,” said Polenz. “The party is more united on this question than only a year ago.”

The CDU’s resolve will be tested as soon as this autumn, when three states in the former East Germany go to the polls in state elections. In Saxony and Brandenburg polls predict triumphs for the AfD, who will need coalition partners to go into government.