Political assassinations are not just an American problem – they have been all too frequent throughout history
- Written by: Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University
By the time Julius Caesar died with the words “Et tu, Brute?” on his lips, political assassinations were already a common occurrence.
But have they become rarer in modern times? Was the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump an outlier event in modern democracies?
The short answer is no.
The United States, of course, has a long history of assassinations and assassination attempts that includes Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and more recently Ronald Reagan.
But assassinations are relatively common outside the US, as well. And only rarely do they bring about the radical changes the killer desires.
What counts as an assassination?
An assassination is the murder of a prominent, powerful individual, particularly a political figure. Rarely random attacks, assassinations are an extreme form of protest based on the assumption that removing a single individual will change the political landscape.
Yet, not all political killings are assassinations.
For instance, states frequently order extrajudicial targeted killings, something that is regrettably on the rise.
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the state has orchestrated a large number of fatal poisonings, shootings, plane crashes and defenestrations.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently accused India of ordering a hit on a Sikh separatist in Canada. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul – an execution that US intelligence agencies allege the Saudi crown prince approved.
For its part, the US has repeatedly used extrajudicial targeted killings against high-profile targets, such as September 11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. Israel also regularly uses lethal violence against targets outside its borders.
Assassinations, however, are often seen as acts of “unofficial” violence committed by those outside the structures of the state.
Usually committed by individuals who oppose the direction taken by political leaders, assassinations reject the notion that states alone have the right to use or authorise physical force. This is often referred to as “a state monopoly on violence.”
The evolution of political assassinations
In the heyday of Europe’s powerful monarchies prior to the 20th century, revolutionary groups used assassinations to make clear to the people that, for all of their power, the rulers of the day were mortal, too.
According to one historian, revolutionaries tried to kill “nearly every major European ruler and head of state” in the late 1800s.
For example, in an act of what some anarchists called “propaganda by deed”, Tsar Alexander II was murdered by the Russian revolutionary group People’s Will in 1881. Their Italian comrades then successfully killed Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1898.
Other assassins of the time were fervent nationalists. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Serbian Gavrilo Princip, whose murder of the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to the first world war.
After the war, fascist and proto-fascist paramilitaries in Italy and Germany also used political assassinations as a part of their terror.
The socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, for example, were murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in Berlin in 1919. Before Italy slipped entirely into fascist dictatorship, the prominent socialist Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated by Benito Mussolini’s goons in Rome.
During the second world war, resistance groups also used assassinations against the Nazis. The killing of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS chief who played a key role in carrying out the Holocaust, in Prague in May 1942 is still celebrated today in the Czech Republic.
In the decades that followed the war, ultra-left revolutionary vanguardist groups began to embrace the political tactic of assassinations enthusiastically.
In Germany, for instance, the Red Army Faction assassinated leading bankers, industrialists, politicians and others from the 1970s to 1990s in the hope of fomenting revolution.
A similar group in Italy, the Red Brigades, murdered Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
In the US, Sara Jane Moore also sought to spark a revolution with her attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, just two weeks after the Manson family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had tried to do the same thing.
Killing for the nation
While these revolutionaries resorted to violence to achieve their goals, assassinations by ultra-nationalists have also continued unabated.
Just a few months after India gained independence from Britain, the resistance leader Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindutva extremist who felt Gandhi had promoted Muslim-Hindu unity.
More high-profile political killings followed in India:
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 after she ordered military action against Sikh separatists
and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, who was assassinated while electioneering in 1991 by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber after relations between the separatist movement and the Indian government soured.
In 2007, Benazir Bhutto, the former prime Minister of Pakistan, survived one assassination attempt (a bombing that killed 180 people) before being killed in another.
The reasons for the assassination remain murky. Some believe she was targeted by Islamists angry at her closeness to the West; others believe then-President Pervez Musharraf wanted to be rid of an inconvenient rival. Musharraf was later charged in her killing; he denies any responsibility.
Elsewhere, ultra-nationalism was the motivation for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing ultra-Zionist in 1995. Rabin was killed (as Anwar Sadat of Egypt had been before him) for attempting to move towards a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
For the effect his killing had on the shape of the contemporary Middle East, some have labelled it “the most successful assassination in history”.
Sadly, assassinations remain all too common in Africa today. One report estimated there were 185 assassinations on the continent in 2019 and 2020 alone, mostly of politicians, civil society and community leaders, and journalists. It’s estimated that 80% of assassinations in Africa are politically motivated.
Latin America is also frequently rocked by assassinations. In recent years, the anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was murdered in Ecuador, apparently by figures linked to powerful drug cartels.
And then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed during a rally in Brazil – an attack believed to have helped him win the 2018 election.
Assassinations in the West
Assassinations also continue to be a common occurrence in liberal democracies, despite having more stable governments overall. The reasons for these vary, though in recent years, many politicians have been targeted by right-wing extremists.
In Japan, Shinzo Abe was assassinated in 2022 by a lone gunman who had a grudge against a church he believed the ex-prime minister had supported.
In Germany, a conservative politician, Walter Lübcke, was murdered in 2019 by a right-wing extremist violently opposed to his pro-migration policies. A far-right extremist was also behind the killing of British MP Jo Cox in 2016.
Earlier this year, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was seriously wounded by a gunman with connections to right-wing groups.
Conversely, it was a far-right politician, Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in the Netherlands by a fellow citizen outraged at the way Fortuyn had scapegoated Dutch Muslims for political purposes.
An end to assassinations?
As long as disgruntled people outside the political process feel that something can be gained by killing a prominent individual, assassinations will continue to be a macabre part of the political landscape. State-sanctioned extrajudicial killings seem likely to continue, as well.
But as the bomb-throwing anarchists of the early 20th century came to realise, killing an individual political figure rarely brings about the widespread change the act desires.
It is impossible to assassinate a system, a structure, a movement or an idea. Real political change requires more complex forms of engagement than the shortcut of the assassin’s bullet.
Authors: Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University
