IIn Hamburg, an anti-right demonstration was broken up by the organizers on Friday evening. Apparently the expected number of participants was far exceeded. Kazim Abaci from the Entrepreneurs Without Borders association, which helped organize the demonstration, initially spoke of 130,000 participants that evening. The organizers later corrected the number to 80,000. The police spoke of 50,000 demonstrators. Significantly fewer participants were expected.
The demonstrators gathered at Jungfernstieg, where a broad alliance of trade unions, churches, cultural workers, business associations, parties and clubs had called for a rally under the motto “Hamburg stands up – together against right-wing extremism and neo-Nazi networks”. The background to the demo was the secret meeting between right-wing extremists, including AfD officials, in Potsdam.
Tschentscher: “We are the majority”
Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) spoke at the rally and sharply attacked the AfD. “The message to the AfD and its right-wing networks is: We are the majority and we are strong because we are united and because we are determined not to let our country and our democracy be destroyed a second time after 1945.”
When the Potsdam meeting became known, we learned “that right-wing radicals in Germany are planning a coup and a systematic so-called remigration of millions of citizens of our country,” he said. This shows how quickly populism can turn into anti-constitutional, democracy and people-contemptuous activities.
The very word remigration is an outrageous trivialization. “They want deportation. They want to turn back time, back to a time of hate and violence,” said Tschentscher.
The mayor also did not accept the AfD's argument that the meeting in Potsdam was a “private” event. This doesn't matter to him at all: “Anyone who plans to deport people is a right-wing radical enemy of the constitution and nothing else!”
The demonstration was originally supposed to take place on the town hall market. The AfD had made this impossible by registering a parliamentary group meeting at short notice, as in this case there would be a 350 meter perimeter around the town hall.
Thousands of people also demonstrated in North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein on Friday. Rallies are scheduled for Saturday in Nuremberg, Dortmund, Hanover, Erfurt, Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main, among others. On Sunday, in addition to Munich, demonstrations will also take place in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig and Bonn, among others.
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