Tens of thousands of people continue to demonstrate every day against right-wing extremism. More than 60 demonstrations are planned for the weekend.
In early January 2024, hundreds of people demonstrated in Frankfurt am Main against the far right and the AfD. Photo: Florian Wiegan/Eibner press photo/imago
SEDAN taz | Tens of thousands of people continue to take to the streets every day against right-wing extremism. In the week from Monday to Thursday, 38,000 people took to the streets across Germany, half of them on Monday in a large demonstration in Frankfurt am Main. This is demonstrated by a thorough analysis of media and police reports on the events.
In general, the number of demonstrations and participants is decreasing. Last week, more than 100,000 people demonstrated from Monday to Thursday. Over the weekend, more than 600,000 people participated in more than 200 demonstrations. Fewer protests have been announced for this week, but there are still at least 60 by taz's count.
The protests were sparked by revelations by the Correctiv research center about a meeting of neo-Nazis in late November, at which some politicians from the far-right AfD party, as well as individual members of the CDU and the far-right party The Union of Valores participated in Potsdam. These were also plans to denaturalize and expel non-white people and people with foreign roots.
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An alliance in Munich calls for a “sea of lights for democracy” on Sunday afternoon and expects up to 30,000 people to attend; It is very possible that hundreds of thousands will come again, like on January 21. In addition, protests are planned in many small cities.
Many small demonstrations in hundreds of places: that is the trend of the current wave of protests against right-wing extremism. Of the more than 850 demonstrations evaluated by the TAZ, only about 50 had more than 10,000 protesters. The vast majority of them were demonstrations with a three- or four-digit number of participants. More than 100,000 people gathered just five times.
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Between three and four million people demonstrated
A new number of participants in the large demonstration on January 19 was announced in Hamburg on Wednesday: based on aerial photographs, the Interior authorities estimate that there would be 180,000 people on the streets, and not 50,000, as the police initially estimated. This makes the demonstration in Hamburg the largest in Germany, unless the police made such a big miscalculation elsewhere.
The list of taz demonstrations now shows more than 850 demonstrations since January 12. In total, all protests had at least 3 million participants. According to the often higher estimates of the organizers, it was almost four million.
For two weeks now we have been collecting the dates of current demonstrations against right-wing extremism, also via the email address demo Notices@taz.de. So far we have received more than 500 suggestions. This list forms the basis of our analysis; The processed data can be downloaded from our charts and used freely. We appreciate reports of bugs and outdated information and will be happy to correct them.