Monday, December 6th, 2021
Alarmed by a torch march
Saxony’s interior minister wants to be rigorous
Right-wing extremists have been mobilizing for so-called “walks” in Saxon cities for weeks, and thousands of opponents of the Corona policy have followed their calls. The police let them be. When the country’s health minister is threatened personally, the interior minister calls for consistent action.
After the torchlight march in front of the private house of the Saxon Health Minister Petra Köpping, State Interior Minister Roland Wöller called for a rigorous approach to violations of corona rules. The march of opponents of the Corona policy was “an attack on democracy” and required “a clear signal from the rule of law,” said the CDU politician of the “Bild” newspaper. “I am calling for rapid trials to punish violations of the corona protective measures immediately and rigorously! Something like this cannot only happen weeks later.”
Wöller also pleaded for a change in federal laws in order to be able to take action against hate posts in social networks such as Telegram, which “have long ceased to be harmless messenger services, but rather platforms for hate and agitation.” The police must be able to “get the real names of the people who are hiding there behind some fancy names.”
Wöller himself has come under increasing criticism in recent days because he has so far had little or nothing to counter the forbidden corona protests in the Free State. “This pandemic and the unreasonableness of many can not be fought with police means and certainly not with violence,” he told “T-Online” in response to the “walks” of hundreds of opponents to which the right-wing extremist rallying movement “Free Saxony” mobilized . Only stationary rallies with up to ten participants are currently allowed in Saxony. According to the portal, however, Wöller expressed his understanding for the protests, and the failure of the police to intervene served to de-escalate.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution observes radicalization
According to the “Bild” newspaper, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Dirk-Martin Christian, observed growing radicalization among the demonstrators. “The idea of violent resistance to democratic rules is now one of the typical standard demands of the movement of corona deniers,” Christian told the newspaper. Under the influence of right-wing extremists, “Reichsbürgern” and anti-Semites, the protests have become “more and more aggressive”. “At the latest with the violent attacks on police officers and journalists and the punitive verbal attacks against the Saxon Prime Minister, the ‘red lines’ have clearly been crossed.”
It is remarkable that “the participants from the so-called bourgeois spectrum show no tendency to clearly distance themselves from extremists and their anti-constitutional agenda,” said Christian. With the increasing number of infections and corona measures, the risk increases “that the crowd of dissatisfied, who think they can find a solution to their problems in conspiracy theories and subversion fantasies,” warned the Saxon constitutional protection chief.
Meanwhile, the police in Dresden are facing a large-scale operation. On Monday, the emergency services expect a protest in front of the Saxon state parliament. The reason: Parliament wants to decide on the determination of the epidemic situation in the Free State at noon. The police said on Friday that the protest will be called on in particular in social networks.