Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated at the weekend in Germany against the far-right party AfD (Alternative for Germany) and its radical ideology, which has sparked an unusual mobilization, both due to the transversality of the organizers and the ‘amplitude of the protests.
The organizers of the marches (among them Friday per Future and the Cam Sepact alliance) talk about a hundred demonstrations since Friday and bring the sum of those who have taken to the streets to 1.4 million people. In Munich, the influx of people at yesterday’s demonstration was so great (we are talking about a hundred thousand people) that the police of the Bavarian capital, in coordination with the organizers, had to interrupt it for security reasons.
On the esplanade of the Reichstag in Berlin, the turnout was equally massive, with an estimated 100,000 people attending according to the police (350,000 according to the organizers). According to the estimates of the ARD network, another 250,000 people would have demonstrated on Saturday.
The mobilizations include the impact caused by the revelation, on January 10, by the German investigative media Correctiv of a meeting of extremists in Potsdam in which Martin Sellner, representative of the Austrian Identity Movement, would have presented for discussion a massive plan of deportations of foreigners or of foreign origin. The AfD had to admit that some of its members had participated in the meeting, but denied that they were in agreement with the project, described as “remigration”.
The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, went so far as to state in the press that the meeting recalled “the horrible Wannsee conference”, in which the Nazis planned the extermination of European Jews in 1942. It is not at all clear that the demonstrations will change the attitude of those who vote for the AfD, but according to some observers they may lead some supporters to question the meaning of their vote.
In any case, this weekend’s demonstrations are a wake-up call for many people who until now had been distant, or skeptical, of the progress of this party that electoral polls place in second place only behind the conservatives of the CDU-CSU.
Precisely in Dresden, capital of the state of Saxony, one of the territories where the AfD registers a higher number of votes, the police spoke yesterday of “an enormous number of participants”. In Cologne, the organizers spoke of 70,000 people, while in Bremen the figure rose to 45,000.
In the plan he presented, Sellner considered sending around two million people to North Africa – asylum seekers, foreigners and non-assimilated German citizens -, as published by Correctiv.
Numerous political leaders, including Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who took part in one of the demonstrations last weekend, stressed that any plan to deport people of foreign origin is an attack on the democracy.
“The Republic rises”, could be read yesterday in the weekly Der Spiegel after noting the influx of people on Saturday. Both religious and religious leaders, political leaders or Bundesliga coaches participate in the calls for demonstrations.
