Today, Tuesday, in Berlin, part of the city experienced a power outage, affecting about 50,000 households. Power won’t be restored for many of them, until Wednesday or even Thursday.
This was due to a fire damaging a power line, at 3:30 AM. Police suspect “politically motivated arson”.
“politically motivated” – this term may not be familiar to many. E.g. in the UK, they went to talking about terrorism already after some group painted an airplane, after they easily got into an supposedly secure area this plane was at.
So, please allow me to try to explain, what this term means.
In example, let’s take my political stance about road safety. I am a fan of individual mobility, but also a fan of people making it back to their loved ones, after venturing outside. In Berlin in 2024, this wasn’t the case for 55 persons, who died due to traffic accidents, with about half of them having been on foot.
I may even have got as far, as writing elaborate essays, such as about improved design of road intersections, and as far as speeches, such as:
“Why, people, why? Real life isn’t supposed to be like Hunger Games etcetera. Let’s stop this sort of social-darwinist lottery of death, in which every week someone gets killed (on average). And let’s instead improve public matters for everyone!”
But, to no avail for real improvement. CDU and SPD even announced another cut to the budget for pedestrian safety, bringing it to about 3 million Euro, which is apparently the entire budget per year, for improving e.g. pedestrian crossings, from a city budget of about 40 billion Euro.
And now to the hypothetical, let’s say I am all mad about it, that people are just a statistic to them people in charge, who drive around in their limousines. And with such rage about these things, I go out at night and slash the tires of cars, perhaps in some misguided notion of that such action will wake the people up, and perhaps even make them stand against this system, that cares so little about fundamental rights of humans, such as the right to life, to begin with.
But, once caught, I would get charged, for what is considered a crime. And, it wouldn’t be nice to the people affected, some of who may be working for little money i.e. as nurse, confronted in the morning with not being able to get to work by car, and having quite some hassle to get it fixed. And it would produce a lot of unnecessary waste.
And in such context, what local police would talk about, is a crime, that was politically motivated.
Not sure, where exactly such case would show up in the police statistics of “politically motivated crime”, where the categories are “right extremism, left extremism, and Islamist extremism”. But generally speaking, it seems a more reasonable approach to talk about these matters, than to consider a trespass already a terroristic act, due to which an entire group was proscribed as terrorist by the House of Commons on 2 July 2025.