2024-01-21 17:58:02
BERLIN (AP) — An anti-far-right protest in the German city of Munich on Sunday afternoon ended early due to security concerns after around 100,000 people showed up, police said. The rally was one of dozens across the country over the weekend that drew hundreds of thousands of people in total.
The protests followed a report that revealed that right-wing extremists recently met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship. Some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party were present at the meeting.
In the western city of Cologne, police confirmed that “tens of thousands” of people turned out to protest on Sunday, with organizers speaking of around 70,000 people. A protest Sunday afternoon in Berlin attracted at least 60,000 people and potentially as many as 100,000, police said, according to the German news agency dpa.
A similar protest on Friday in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, drew what police said was a crowd of 50,000 people and had to end early for safety reasons. And Saturday’s protests in other German cities such as Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Hannover attracted tens of thousands of people.
While Germany has seen other anti-far-right protests in recent years, the size and scope of the protests that took place over the weekend — not only in major cities, but also in dozens of smaller towns in the entire country—are remarkable. The mass participation in Germany showed how these protests are galvanizing popular opposition to the AfD in a new way.
The AfD ranks high in opinion polls: Recent polls put it in second place nationally with around 23%, well above the 10.3% it obtained during the last federal election in 2021.
The catalyst for the protests was a report by media outlet Correctiv published last week about an alleged meeting in November that it said was attended by figures from the extremist Identitarian Movement and the AfD. A leading member of the Identitarian Movement, Austrian citizen Martin Sellner, presented his “remigration” vision for deportations, according to the report.
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