Protesting from the comfort zone.
Are Germany's mass demonstrations against the extreme right something more than just convenient, instagrammable, feel-good events?
Everything seems to be spinning out of control in 2024: the next elections could shift the European Parliament to the right like never before; a wanna-be dictator has the concrete chance to run the US again; from Sweden to Finland, from Lithuania to Germany, governments are calling on people to "get ready for war"; talk of war has become commonplace. Finally, our European streets are once again filled with people burning national flags and invoking genocide as a rhetorical weapon against their imaginary enemies.
In such a scenario, the German rallies against the far right, which began less than two weeks ago and are still continuing, are seen as a semi-miracle.
Something is happening in Germany.
Even the most disillusioned cannot play down the scale of what took place on the streets of Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Hanover, Cottbus, Berlin and at least ninety other cities and small towns across East and West Germany over the last weeks: more than a million people across the Country stood up together against right-wing extremism and xenophobia.
The dynamic of the mobilisation surprised many: in several places the number of participants was much higher than announced; in Hamburg and Munich the demonstrations had to be cancelled due to excessive crowds. New demos will take place on weekends as well as during the week.
You have to go back to 1989 to remember such a democratic uprising. Like then, people who had never thought of joining a demonstration took to the streets for the first time.
It is not a homogeneous group, rather the opposite: in 2024´ Germany, we are divided on almost every issue, within our families, within our circles of friends, sometimes indecisive and flighty ourselves.
There is a lot of confusion and volatile opinions on issues such as the war in Ukraine, the green transition, health policy, the military Zeitenwende, the demand for more or less "Europe" in our daily lives, immigration and refugees, not to mention the dilemma of Israel and the Middle East. Public opinion has never been more divided.
Yet, on the Germans streets, all were there with their differences. With rare exceptions the participants respected each other. A wonder, in times like these.
OK, that is big. But does it deserve to be celebrated as a mass resistance movement?
German newspapers these days had very celebratory headlines and definitions:
the decent people's revolt (der Aufstand der Anständigen),
Germany rises (Deutschland steht auf),
the silent centre raises its voice (jetzt spricht die stille Mitte ), etc.
There was more excitement in the newsrooms than in the marching streets.
But we're not coming from years of empty roads. There have been many demonstrations in Germany over the last ten years. Against the extreme right, against the restrictions on pandemics, against the Russian invasion, against the climate crisis, against the alleged Islamisation of the country (remember PEGIDA?), against the war in Ukraine (and for peace with Russia), now against Hamas or Israel, and last but not least the farmers with their tractors blocking the country for days.
According to the Global Protest Tracker, in Europe we have been second only to France and Poland in the number and size of street protests. BTW On a global scale, the number of mass protests has more than tripled in the last fifteen years (see: Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 2021).
So, what´s new this time?
A welcomed safe protest that fits reassuring media narratives.
This time we witness a protest that suits (almost) everyone: it comforts us all, it helps the mainstream media to get their message across, and it reaffirms the legitimacy of the political parties other than the AFD, making us forget for a moment the current struggles and the poor political dialectics of the last years.
In short, we have been given the protests we all want: demonstrations that make the participants feel right, and allow the non-participants to express their support without making too many distinctions, plus give the reporters some good news to sell after two years of pre-apocalyptic stories.
Some have called them 'feel good' events or 'collective mental health' exercises.
Blessed and welcomed by all, so generic that it can include - or be claimed by - any political party, it is questionable whether it can become the birth of a movement.
To understand whether we can expect anything more after this celebration of democracy, we need to start at the beginning: at the root of what brings these millions of people onto the streets.
Potsdam, November 2022: fantasies of mass deportations.
The protest was triggered by a secret meeting held last November in an elegant resort near Potsdam, the details of which were uncovered by the Berlin-based investigative platform Correctiv.
Every detail of the meeting, starting with its location - a few kilometres from the Wannsee villa where the Final Solution was conceived in 1942 - makes it more like a bad film than reality.
A group of people led by Martin Sellner, a well-known right-wing extremist from Austria (déjà vu: the Austrian Nazi - a German obsession), discussed - among other typical far-right topics - a "remigration plan" to get rid of undesirables in Germany.
Thirty people were invited, including long-time right-wing extremists, AfD functionaries, including Roland Hartwig, a personal adviser to AfD co-leader Alice Weidel (she subsequently fired him), a few CDU members (!), and representatives of the professional class, including doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.
Remigration plan? The neutral word means, to put it bluntly, deportation. So far, nothing really new. AFD members have been talking about remigration since years. More interesting and disturbing are the "where" and the "who" of the remigration plan.
The "where". A country in Africa would be the destination of the remigration plan. Does that sound new? It is not. Another African country, the island of Madagascar, was part of the original plan approved by Hitler (1938-1940) to solve the Jewish problem in Germany and Africa. It was replaced two years later by the final solution.
The "who". Here Sellner displays his textual precision and breadth of vision. In the speech reported by Correctiv, he categorises the target groups who should leave Germany as follows:
Firstly, asylum seekers (again, nothing new);
Secondly, foreign immigrants with the right to stay;
Thirdly (the real novelty that set off the alarm bells), German citizens with a migrant background who have not "assimilated" (according to criteria defined by the honourable group of guests). These last, Sellner admits, pose the biggest problem, because a way needs to be found to deprive them of the basic rights granted by citizenship.
Now the bell becomes a siren.
If you add up all the groups, we are talking about a potential 19 million people. This is what Sellner himself says. For us, it is enough to remember that 25% of the population currently living in Germany (84,7 Mio. people) has a migration background.
If this were not true, it would be a fantastic piece of theatre... which it became! Aweek ago, the Berliner Ensemble, based in East Berlin, offered an instant staged reading of the meeting, which is available on Youtube (automated subtitles in all languages):
Low appetite for theatre? The Correctiv report has been translated into all major languages and is itself a gripping piece of political drama: Geheimplan gegen Deutschland, Secret Plot against Germany, 10 January ´24
Unleashing the original German Angst. The original one.
In 2019, historian Frank Biess examined the concept of German Angst as a driving force in German post-war history.
Biess sees German Angst as a cyclical phenomenon that varies from time to time depending on the historical phase: in Germany under Allied occupation, the fear was initially of the revenge of the victims and the victors; then, in the emerging West German democracy, it became the fear of falling back into the Nazi and authoritarian past; in the 1960s, the new fears had to do with nuclear weapons and the Third World War. And so, from decade to decade, new fears developed: the fear of losing prosperity, the fear of succumbing to technology, the fear of sexual freedom, the fear of terrorism and immigration, the fear of environmental destruction.
Every era had its dominant fear. Today, however, we have a traffic jam of fears, all together and all at the same time: climate, terrorism, war, immigration, technology, sexual identity, loss of culture of reference... The AFD has used some of these fears to develop its agenda.
But the return to the fear of the beginnings, of going back to where the German contemporaneity began - dictatorship, mass deportations, concentration camps - and what followed - rubble, destruction and poverty - this fear seemed to have disappeared: the idea of using it as a spectre against the extreme right seemed a futile exercise.
Until a few months ago, no one was daring to compare Germany in 2024 with the Weimar Republik. You see a lot of stupid people in the streets, but not SA torches or violent street battles with horse charges and dead and wounded.
But since the re-enactment of the Potsdam meeting has been circulated, this fear has returned, and on a massive scale: if most AFD phrases of the past did not seem to touch most of us directly, if anti-Islam slogans and posters were basically disturbing up to a certain point, after Potsdam 11/2023 it became damned tangible what could happen in reality. Many heard in their dreams the SS knocking on the door of their homes to take away husbands, children, friends, schoolmates. Hence, the worse spectre: the original German fear of going back, really going back.
This time a lot of people thought: "Oh f*ck, this is no longer about closing borders, sending back asylum seekers, limiting immigration. This is about deportation. Maybe of people like us. Or even us."
Memories evoke other memories. And in Germany, nothing moves more than fear.
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Gewerkschaftler holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Gewerkschaftler. Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist. When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn't Jewish. When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.
The text of this sermon is often quoted around the 27 January. It belongs to the canon of anti-Nazi remembrance. Somehow the three-group plan for remigration resonates in this text: if you could ignore slogans and programmes before, now these slogans and programmes affect you.
Asked to explain the reason for participating in the demonstrations, the less politicised people answered with this: it was the feeling that their own families, their friends, themselves - previously unaware - could have been the potential objects of these plans.
An easy way to exorcise the fear.
In a country like Germany, it is easier to exorcise such fears in the midst of thousands of people under the simple umbrella of anti-fascism. Yes. Easy. Germany is not Poland, not Hungary, not even Italy, where if you shout “Long live anti-fascist Italy!” from the gallery of a theatre, the police will ask for your identity card. (This happened at the opening of the season of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in December 2023).
In Germany it is protocol to call yourself an anti-fascist, an anti-Nazi. Anyone can fit in, even people with wacky ideas. You can say 'All against fascism', as the whole audience shouted at the end of the Berliner Ensemble's one week ago, without having to know the historical difference between fascism and Nazism.
But fear is a poor advisor.
One. Fear can be a call to simplistic solutions on the fringes of democracy.
For weeks now, several organisations have been promoting petitions calling for the AFD party to be banned. Others are calling for AFD leader Björn Hoecke (who is close to being a post-Nazi) to be deprived of his constitutional political rights.
In the political buildings of Berlin, someone is considering to go the same way as the Federal Constitutional Court did on the 23rd of January this year, when it revoked state funding to an extreme right party called Die Heimat (heir of the post-Nazi NPD), because it "shows disdain for the free democratic basic order".
All of the above options are provided by the existing constitutional self-defence laws, which many outside the country envy us for and admire the way these laws are applied.
However, all this requires more than an aversion to ideas, but real evidence that individuals or parties are plotting against the democratic order. The Potsdam meeting was a scandal beyond imagination. But it was not an AFD party meeting.
Using change.org or other platforms to call on the constitutional authorities to take such steps maliciously suggests that they are not doing enough to uphold the democratic order. This is unfair and unwise. On the contrary, it sounds like a desire to twist the rule of law to your advantage.
Two. Fear can divide even more than today.
According to a Bertelsmann study from 2021, only about a third of all AfD voters have a closed right-wing extremist worldview. It does not make sense to accuse all AFD voters of being extremists or enemies, as someone wrote on their anti-right posters in the streets.
Two thirds voted and will continue to vote for the AFD out of frustration and angst: the many anxieties that now populate Germany, and which some of the demonstrators of these weeks share.
In times of polarisation, the simplicity of calling all those who hold opinions with which we disagree Nazis (or Fascists) does not help to restore a culture of debate of which, until a few years ago, Germany was very proud. Accusing someone of being a Nazi has become pure slang and a way of stopping any conversation in its crip. From democrats we expect more and better ways of dealing with the other side.
Frustration cannot be banned like a political party. Fears can only be removed by addressing the complex issues without denying them: recognition is the first step.
Is the fear of uncontrolled migration legitimate or not in a country that had 80 million inhabitants in 2025 and now has almost 85 million?
Is the fear of losing one's cultural compass by being overwhelmed by other cultures justifiable or not?
Do the 64% of Saxons who, according to a recent survey, believe that Germany is "dangerously" over-foreignised deserve to have their fears and feelings taken seriously or not?
Across Germany, 45% of people are dissatisfied with democracy. You can neither call them all Nazis nor deprive them of their constitutional right to vote.
Three. Fear can be a cover for not seeing the problems - and not dealing with them.
In a very German tradition, all political parties publish and regularly update their political basic manifestos, the so-called Grundsatzprogramm.
The AFD's manifesto covers 14 issues, from how to renew democratic institutions (not how to dismantle them, at least on paper!), to the economy and consumer protection, to infrastructure and transport.
Let's take the AFD point about the European Union (which I have always been the most passionate advocate of): to say no to the development of Europe into a federal state is a legitimate demand; to say no to the banking union is also a legitimate demand; to say no to the euro is somehow stupid and counterproductive for Germany, which has access to the largest single market since the introduction of the euro. However, there are European countries that have decided not to join the euro, such as Denmark. Denmark is seen as a model of a well-run European country.
Point by point, you will find issues that need to be discussed in depth because they ARE problematic. There is a lot of convervatism in this programme, but it is not a racist manifesto. Chapter seven also deals with the issue of multiculturalism, with a clear "no". And we know - even Merkel said so years ago - that multiculturalism has failed because it has tried to let co-exist cultures that in many cases refuse to accept each other and are in conflict with our European sense of Human Rights. Can we agree that "multiculturalism" should also be erased from our European compass?
I am not writing an argument for the AFD. But I warn against using fear as a way of refusing debate and dismissing problems. Problems do not disappear by saying they are not there. That is why you need to go beyond your German fear and approach reality, including its ambiguity: sometimes you will discover that you cannot give left/right labels to many solutions, because problems are multifaceted, and so are potential solutions.
Beyond fear, for more courage.
It doesn't take much courage to walk around with a sign that says “Keiner mag die Nazis” ('Nobody likes Nazis'). Nor does it take much courage to write “Nie wieder ist jetzt” (´Never again is now´) without putting it in the right context and giving it a concrete meaning.
Few slogans are associated with the darkest side of National Socialism as much as “Nie wieder ist jetzt” (Never Again). This phrase, however worn out, belongs to the culture of German memory - die Erinnerungskultur - (a more fragile construct than we thought): this phrase denounces the deportations, the anti-Jewish pogroms, the extermination camps. This phrase has returned to the lips of those who witnessed the horrors of October 7.
Where were the masses of German citizens with these placards in the days and weeks after the massacre in Israel? Don't be surprised if some commentators looked at the streets these days with a certain bitterness, because they expected them to be filling up three months ago.
And: in the coming weeks and months it will be necessary to have the courage not only to say what you are against, but also what you are for. Soon even the choice of which party to vote for will become more difficult, even from an intellectual point of view: something is happening in Germany not only on the streets, but also in politics.
At least three new parties are emerging:
the alliance around Sahra Wagenknecht, a puzzle for those who think in terms of left-right stereotypes, but - it must be said - also the one whose programme most directly addresses the need to give a point-by-point answer to the AFD;
in the coming weeks a new right-wing party led by the much-discussed former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen;
and finally an Islamic party directly inspired by President Erdogan, which counts on potential three million voters.
Things are going to get complicated, and two posters with banal slogans are not going to be enough to solve the riddle of which direction Germany, and with it Europe, is going to take.
Banning symbols, fighting ideas. Where do we stand in Germany and Italy in 2024?
A video from Italy has been circulating on social media over the past week: it comes from a commemoration held every year by neo-fascists in Rome and, as every year, it shows hundreds of arms raised in the fascist salute.
Saturday 3 February 2024: Rallies continue: In the heart of the German capital, under intermittent rain showers, an estimated 150,000 people gathered in front of the Bundestag. It was just one of many massive protests taking place across the country. From Berlin to Freiburg to Hanover, a video round-up from ARD Tagesschau takes us to the heart of these demonstrations: youtu.be/aRETIDMYoRo