About a million people took to the streets in Germany last weekend to demonstrate. In Berlin and Munich the turnout was so high that the demonstration had to be canceled because the masses were endangering their own safety. It must have been since the fall of the Wall in Berlin that demonstrations brought out so many people in our eastern neighbors.
The subject of the mass demonstrations can be summarized in one German expression of two words that still sounds like a gong three quarters of a century later. Never again. Not again. A million Germans took to the streets to make it known that they do not want the far right to return to power in the country.
To be clear, this is not yet the case. The democratic institutions are on firmer footing today than was the case in 1933, the dark reference year in modern German history in which Adolf Hitler seized power. In addition, the other German parties have erected a kind of cordon sanitary around the AfD, the rapidly growing radical right party in the country.
According to some, the risks should not be exaggerated and exaggerated alarmism threatens to put into perspective the murderous madness of historical Nazism. Not every far-right politician is immediately a neo-Nazi, but that is not necessary to disrupt a society.
At the very least, the AfD does not show itself to be very sensitive to the troubled history of its own country. The reason for the mass demonstrations is a meeting at which AfD politicians were discussing a deportation plan for migrants with other extremists. That meeting took place in Potsdam, a stone’s throw from Lake Wannsee, where Nazi leaders gathered in 1942 to hammer out their ‘Final Solution’ for the ‘Jewish Question’ and actually set the Holocaust in motion. You just have to dare.
The AfD is a good example of the new, hybrid type of far-right parties. Just like the VB in our country or Georgia Meloni’s party in Italy, they mix an apparently decent shop window with a rear building full of nasty, extremist beliefs. They are constantly jumping from one leg to the other. Forced deportation? No, only for deported refugees. Or this weekend at VB. Repopulation as a conscious EU strategy as MEP Tom Vandendriessche intended? No, we are only referring to the demographic reality of a changing population. In the meantime, the seeds have been planted and the goalposts of the debate have moved again.
Demonstrations, even if they bring out a million people, will not in themselves stop the advance of the far right. But at least they also hold up an uncomfortable mirror to us here. Because while in Germany hundreds of thousands are shouting out their protest, here the day is not far away when a politician will shout ‘Repopulation!’ shouts in the evening on a game show when you press a button.
