Germany: Thousands protest after secret meeting of the ultra-right comes to light
Thousands of people demonstrated on Sunday in the streets of Berlin, Potsdam and Saarbrücken against extremism and the ultra-right. The Mayor of Potsdam said 10,000 people protested, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Deutsche-Presse Agentur (DPA) reports.
“I am here as one of thousands of residents of Potsdam who support democracy and are against both the old and the new fascism,” Baerbock told DPA. Some protesters in Berlin carried banners reading “Fascism Never Again”.
The demonstrations were convened in response to an article by Correctiv, an investigative group that reported this week how in November 2023, at a secret meeting in Potsdam, representatives of the ultra-right met to discuss how to achieve the expulsion of millions of people who are of immigrant origin from Germany. The meeting was reportedly attended by members of Germany’s ultra-conservative WerteUnion [Values Union], members of the ultra-right identitarian movement, and also members of the far-right, populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The AfD, which is currently the second-strongest party in Germany, according to opinion polls, has been distancing itself from the November meeting. Its officials said members of the party who attended the meeting were there purely for personal reasons and not in their capacity as AfD members.
If elections to the legislature were to be held in Germany right now, polls say the opposition conservative union of the CDU/CSU [the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU)] would win and the AfD would come in second ahead of the governing Social Democrats (SPD), the Associated Press reports.
