Frankfurt am Main (epd). In Germany, more than a hundred thousand people took to the streets against right-wing extremism on Saturday. According to police reports, around 35,000 people gathered in Frankfurt am Main. The large influx made it necessary to expand the area of the rally from the Römer market square to the surrounding streets and squares. The police also counted around 35,000 demonstrators in Hanover and around 15,000 each in Dortmund and Kassel.
There were also rallies in numerous other cities, including Braunschweig, Erfurt and Stuttgart, where, according to organizers, around 20,000 people gathered on the central Schlossplatz. Demonstrations are planned for Sunday in Berlin, Cologne and Munich, among others. The wave of protests was triggered by “Correctiv” research into a meeting between AfD representatives with neo-Nazis and entrepreneurs at the end of November, at which the mass expulsion of people with a migration background was discussed.
“”What you are showing here is constitutional protection in action,” Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) shouted to the protesters in Hanover. The AfD and the right-wing extremists are pushing the boundaries of what can be said and thought to the right. “Migrants, Be they here for a short time or in the fourth generation, they are all part of our community,” emphasized Weil.
Hanover’s Protestant regional bishop Ralf Meister emphasized that it is important to defend democracy and work for it. On the other hand, anyone who denies other people’s rights, rambles about the nationalist myth and turns parliament into a “rabble room” is a “democratic traitor.”
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) welcomed the nationwide demonstrations in a newspaper interview. “It makes me very positive that so many people have taken to the streets for democracy in the last few days,” she told the newspapers of the Funke media group (Saturday). Democracy is under attack and faces major challenges. “We have to actively defend them,” warned Faeser.
The President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, also praised the demonstrations as an important signal against growing extremism. Schuster told the “Augsburger Allgemeine” (Saturday) that he had the feeling so far that the AfD’s high poll numbers and electoral successes “didn’t lure anyone out from behind the scenes.” That worried him. “That’s why I’m pleased when people take to the streets now and express their dissatisfaction.”
Support for the protests also comes from the cultural sector. The frontman of the Kölsch rock band BAP, Wolfgang Niedecken, said with regard to the demonstrations: “It was about time.” People should no longer accept the current developments. “What is important now is to position ourselves against the right,” he told the Phoenix television station in an interview broadcast on Friday evening.