A transversal civic movement against the extreme right, without a main leader or single convener, is sweeping through Germany. Tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets and squares in large cities and medium-sized towns – according to the police, on Friday 50,000 people gathered in Hamburg and yesterday in Frankfurt there were 35,000 – in a trail of indignation and alert that continues. this Sunday with marches in Berlin, Munich and several other places, and which seems to continue over time.
The unofficial motto is Together against the extreme right, in reference to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, which since 2017 has been represented in the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) and which now occupies second place in voters’ preferences according to polls.
The trigger for the marches was the revelation by the journalistic investigative outlet Correctiv of the participation of AfD officials in a meeting of extreme right-wing identitarians and neo-Nazis last November in Potsdam, in which the Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner presented a project to expel non-native people from Germany. Sellner spoke of what they call remigration: forcing the population of foreign origin that does not fit into their ethnic concept of Germany to leave the country, including people with German nationality.
The AfD reluctantly admitted the presence of some of its own at the meeting, but insisted that it does not subscribe to the expulsion plan as proposed. However, as the protesters who flood the cities point out, the xenophobic and racist spirit regarding migration and a Nazi aftertaste permeate the actions and attitudes of this party. Among the banners seen in marches in Leipzig, Hamburg, Essen, Cologne or Rostock, phrases with allusions to Hitler’s Germany can be read, such as: “Voting for the AfD is so 1933”; “Now we can do it better than our grandparents”; “Never again is now”; or “Nazis? No, thanks”.
These marches suggest an authentic awakening of civil society in a country that seemed to have assumed the presence and consolidation of the AfD, which was born eleven years ago as a Europhobic nationalist party, soon evolved towards a populist right-wing anti-immigration and anti-Islam discourse and has become radicalized and consolidated as a far-right formation, with seats in the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) since 2017.
“Many people have seen for years that this is not going well, and Correctiv’s research has been the straw that broke the camel’s back; “We want to defend our democracy and our Constitution, and tell the people directly threatened by the extreme right that the majority of us support them and are at their side,” says Marius Inden, a Sociology student involved in DemokraTEAM.org, a demonstration aggregation website. antiAfD, created by volunteers just ten days ago.
It is not the only website of this type, in a movement that travels quickly through social networks. Correctiv collects more than a hundred marches, called by entities, churches, unions, sports clubs, parties, city councils, neighborhood associations and even individuals, and everything indicates that there will be dozens more.
“In recent years the AfD has been underestimated and labeled as an eastern party or a protest party, but polls and election results have shown that the threat is real; “It is necessary to mobilize, and even more so in this election year,” adds Irmgard Wurdack, director of the entity Aufstehen Gegen Rassismus (AgR, Stand Up Against Racism), also involved.
Indeed, in addition to the European elections in June, three eastern länder (Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia) renew their parliaments in September, and according to the polls the AfD would come first in all three with more than 30% of the votes. At the federal level, the AfD scores at 23%, as the second party in preferences, only surpassed by the conservative CDU/CSU bloc (32%), and ahead of the social democratic SPD (16%).
The political class joins the demonstrations. The Social Democratic Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Green Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, attended last Sunday’s march in Potsdam, called by its Social Democratic mayor. “The far right attacks our democracy,” Scholz said on Friday in his weekly video. “We are all called to adopt a clear stance for our democratic Germany, and for our more than twenty million friends, co-workers and neighbors with migratory origins.”
The key element of the current movement seems to be the calling character. “The protests point to a wake-up call for democratic civil society, but also a restart for people committed for a long time who perhaps felt a feeling of resignation,” says Alexander Leistner, a political scientist at the University of Leipzig, who recalls the precedent. of the 2018 demonstrations under the motto Unteilbar (indivisible) against xenophobia. The current ones are distinguished by their fast, decentralized convocation and by the high number of people.
Another question is whether this atmosphere can have any influence on AfD supporters. Leistner warns that “recent years and research show that it is difficult to impress the AfD’s main voters with demonstrations and revelations, although the opinion of supporters who see the AfD as a protest party could change.”
There are also calls to ban the party, which is already partially under observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the interior secret services. However, such an attempt would be a toast to the sun, as almost all jurists agree that it is constitutionally very complicated, and politicians add that it would allow the AfD to present itself as a victim. The Constitutional Court has already twice rejected the banning of the small far-right party NPD – renamed last year as Die Heimat (The Fatherland) – and there are only two historical precedents for banning it in the 1950s in West Germany: a party Nazi and another communist.
Meanwhile, the founding of a new far-right party is also emerging that, with the provisional name of Werteunion (Union of Values), aspires to insert itself politically between the Christian Democrats CDU and the AfD. Its promoter is the former head of Germany’s secret services, Hans-Georg Maassen, who in 2018 was relieved of his position by the then Chancellor Angela Merkel for having dealings with AfD politicians, and who has been in the process of expulsion from the AfD for months. CDU, so technically he is still a member of the party. Maassen and several hundred supporters of the ultra-conservative wing of the CDU met yesterday in Erfurt (Thuringia) to prepare for the birth of the new formation.