Germany: Hundreds of thousands on the streets against the far-right AfD party

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated today across Germany against him far-right AfD party and his extreme ideology, after the revelations about the meeting of his executives with a neo-Nazi organization and the plan to deport immigrants, which for a week has led to rare, mass mobilizations.

Around 100 protests have been organized across the country since Friday, involving 1.4 million people, according to Friday for the Future and civil rights group Campact, one of the organizers of the movement.

The turnout was so great in Munich that the planned march through the streets of the Bavarian capital was cancelled. Police said there were 100,000 protesters in the largest gathering yet.

“Nazis out” and “Never again”, were the prevailing slogans on the placards held by the demonstrators.

In Berlin’s Reichstag Square, the turnout was just as massive: 100,000 according to radio station RBB, citing police figures, 350,000 according to organizers.

Around 250,000 people mobilized on Saturday in dozens of cities, according to estimates by the ARD channel.

This mobilization testifies to the shock caused by the revelation, on January 10, by the German investigative journalism medium Correctiv, of the meeting they had with the November in Potsdam members of far-right and extremist organizations, where a plan for mass deportations of foreigners or people of non-German origin was discussed. Secretary of the Interior Nancy Fesser went so far as to tell the press that this meeting was reminiscent of “the horrible Wannsee Conference” where the Nazis discussed, in 1942, the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

These revelations “brought people out into the street (…) Those who did nothing before are coming now,” said Jörg Lorenz, a Munich resident who demonstrated in his city.

“Those who may not yet know whether to vote for the Alternative for Germany or not, after these demonstrations they can no longer do so,” said another protester, Catherine Delrieux53 years old, who participated in the mobilization for the sake of her three children, “so that they don’t grow up with a brown (ie the color of the AfD) government”.

In Dresden, the capital of Saxony, an AfD stronghold, police spoke of a “huge number of participants”.

In Cologne the organizers spoke of 70,000 demonstrators today while in Bremen the local police estimated the participation at 45,000.

Among those who took part in the “summit of shame”, as some media have described it, were members of the AfD and Austria’s Martin Zellner, a leader of the “identity movement”. Zellner presented a plan to deport to North Africa some 2 million people: asylum seekers, foreigners and also German citizens who have not “assimilated”, according to Correctiv.

The AfD, which has been steadily growing in opinion polls just months before three crucial regional elections in eastern Germany, confirmed the participation of its members in the meeting but says it does not endorse Zellner’s plan.

Many politicians, including the Social Democrat chancellor Olaf Solzwho took part in a demonstration last weekend, underlined that any plan to deport people of non-German origin constitutes an attack on democracy.

“Democracy is waking up,” commented Spiegel magazine after Saturday’s protests.

Politicians, representatives of religious denominations and the coaches of the Bundesliga, the German football league, called on citizens to mobilize against the AfD.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a video message that the protesters “give courage to all of us, defend our democracy and our Constitution against their enemies.”

The AfD has benefited in recent months from popular discontent, due to the new influx of refugees into the country and the disagreements between the three parties of the governing coalition, against the background of the economic slowdown and high inflation. The far-right party, which entered Parliament in 2017, is consistently in second place in terms of voter intention (around 22%) behind the Christian Democrats, at a time when Olaf Solz’s governing coalition with the Greens and Liberals is recording record unpopularity. In its “strongholds”, in the former East Germany, the AfD is the first party, with percentages exceeding 30%.