History Main / BloodOnTheDebateFloor

* UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica: Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra apartheid]], was stabbed to death in Parliament in 1966 by Dimitri Tsafendas, a Communist parliamentary courier. They called the courier deranged, but he had kind of an odd background (his father was white and his mother was mixed-race, which meant that he was legally white--and was in fact denied a request to be reclassified as "Coloured" (i.e. mixed-race) when he asked for it--but still ''looked'' "not white" and suffered a lot of discrimination) which may have been part of his motivation.[[note]]He had deeply-held leftist politics, yes, but he was also frustrated that his classification didn't match his personal identity. Also, it probably messed with his love life--as an officially white man, he would've been forbidden from marrying a non-white woman, but because of his mixed-race appearance, few South African white women of the day would have him.[[/note]] He was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking and a tapeworm]], though an official 2018 report considers this basically arse-covering by the government of the day to hide the fact that the courier kinda had a point (i.e. racism is bad and Verwoerd was a racist who established the most insidious form of institutionalised racism ever seen in South Africa).

* UsefulNotes/{{Austria}}: The Austro-Hungarian Empire's ''Reichsrat'' was the by-word for legislative violence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at least in part because the Empire was composed of many different bits of Europe with their own languages and ethnicities, who were not enamored with the German-speaking ruling class (and the Austrians were not pleased with attempts to extend limited autonomy to these other lands in 1897). Some historians argue that Adolf Hitler came to form his negative opinion of parliamentary democracy at least in part from witnessing debates in the Reichsrat. Creator/MarkTwain describes a typical scene:

* AncientRome: The assassination of UsefulNotes/JuliusCaesar took place at a Senate meeting on 15 March 44 BC held not at the traditional Senate House but at the Theatre of Pompey. His conspirators chose to kill him there precisely because, in an attempt to prevent this trope, senators were forbidden by custom from carrying weapons or bringing in bodyguards, so he would be totally defenseless. (Well--that's the short version. The actual reasoning is actually significantly more complicated and had intricate roots in intricate Roman law, but that's the long and short of it.)

* UsefulNotes/{{Taiwan}}: The Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China is very notable for its fistfights on the debate floor, which can involve up to 50 legislators at a time. It has such a reputation for fistfighting on the debate floor that some lawmakers have been accused of ''staging'' such fights just to maintain that reputation. It doesn't help that the Republic of China is relatively new to democracy (only getting it for real in TheNineties) and that the idea of the sitting President running for re-election (Chen Shui-bian in 2004) staging a (non-fatal, of course) shooting on himself and running mate the day before the actual election to garner sympathy votes was not widely-lampooned speaks to the country's desensitization to political violence by that point -- for what it's worth, Chen won re-election by 0.22% of the votes cast and multiple investigators (include those brought in from the United States) concluded the perpetrator acted alone. Website/ThatOtherWiki lists nine separate incidents of violence in the Legislative Yuan since 2000 (and that's accounting for the fact that violence has gotten ''less'' common since the 1990s), with individual acts ranging from throwing water balloons to barricading the doors with chairs to a FoodFight with bananas to a contentious bill being ''eaten'' by a member to prevent its passage into law, along with all sorts of brawls and fistfights.

** Modern Canada, however, gives us the [[CanadaEh most Canadian version]] of a legislative fight, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tries to intervene in a scuffle, accidentally hits a woman standing behind him with his elbow, and [[ApologizesALot apologizes profusely]].

** At the start of the 2023 Congressional session, the House of Representatives deadlocked on electing a Speaker of the House, despite the fact that the Republicans had a (albeit slim) majority at the time, due to a far-right faction led by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz refusing to support the GOP's candidate Kevin [=McCarthy=], costing him just enough votes to keep him from the required minimum. After days of failed negotiations to satisfy this group, Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama (also a Republican) lunged at Gaetz while he was in private discussion with [=McCarthy=] on the floor (allegedly because Gaetz was asking for a subcommittee chairmanship that Rogers was in line for) and had to be held back and dragged away by North Carolina Congressman Richard Hudson (yet another Republican).

* In ''[[Literature/JackelianSeries The Court Of The Air]]'', physical duels between opposing politicians are apparently a ''standard practice'' in Jackels' Parliament, being conducted one-on-one with batons called "debating sticks" when reconciliation by other means proves unfeasible.

* In ''[[Literature/JackelianSeries The Court Of The Air]]'', physical duels between opposing politicians are apparently a ''standard practice'' in Jackels' Parliament, being conducted with batons called "debating sticks" when reconciliation by other means proves unfeasible.