After months of steadily climbing in the polls, could this be the moment the bubble bursts for the right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people gathered in cities across the country to protest against the party and its ideology.
Over 25,000 people congregated by the Brandenburg gate in Berlin on Sunday, holding placards with slogans such as ‘AfD is not the alternative’ and ‘Defend Democracy’. At least 7,000 turned out in the northern port city of Kiel, a further 5,000 protested in the south-western city of Saarbrücken, and in the city of Dresden just under 1,000 came out to protest. On Friday, 2,000 people also picketed the AfD headquarters in Hamburg.
For many, the summit proposals’ similarities to the Nazis’ ethnic cleansing are too close for comfort
The trigger for the protests was the news, revealed last week, that senior figures in the AfD had met with German and Austrian neo-Nazis (as well as two members of Angela Merkel’s CDU party) at the end of November for a secret summit to discuss plans to deport millions of non-ethnic Germans from the country, including those with German citizenship.
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