Thousands of participants meet in hundreds of cities for a «Monday walk». Confidence in government policy is falling. In addition, there is the imminent mandatory vaccination.
In the fight against Corona there are “no more red lines,” said Chancellor Olaf Scholz. On Monday evening, thousands again took to the streets nationwide, here in Rostock. “We are the red line,” it says on the banner.
The term “Monday demonstration” is currently being given a second meaning in Germany, but the demonstration has recently been called “strolling”. Every Monday in 1989 citizens gathered in Leipzig and other cities in the GDR and fought for freedom and democracy. Now, nationwide opponents of the Corona measures are meeting to protest – with the aim of getting their rights of freedom back. The Prime Ministers of the federal states will meet again next Friday, and they will presumably take new decisions. The protesters are a tiny minority, but the resistance grows as trust in the state wanes.
Declining confidence in the state
The sensibility of the Corona restrictions is no longer apparent to many citizens. “Confidence in corona numbers is gone,” headlined the “Bild” newspaper on Monday. The rapid spread of the Omikron virus with simultaneously falling hospitalization gives the impression that Omikron is comparatively harmless and thus contradicts the rhetoric of the government. Most German citizens are also vaccinated in the meantime, and many of them do not see why the massive restrictions on freedom continue to exist. The fact that vaccination is now to be added, although in the eyes of many people it is unclear how long such a vaccination lasts and whether it could have unknown long-term effects, further exacerbates the social conflict.
The number of participants in the “walks” is steadily increasing. Although one of the main focuses is in eastern Germany, the protests are by no means limited to this, but are taking place in hundreds of cities across the country. There are also not just “lateral thinkers” and AfD sympathizers. According to the Hamburg police, the participants come from the middle of society.
On the first Monday evening of the new year, thousands of “strollers” were out and about in hundreds of cities, in around 180 places in Bavaria alone. Social networks such as the Telegram messenger service or the Twitter platform make work easier for the organizers. They make it possible to reach many people with little effort. On Monday evening, however, counter-demonstrators and vaccination supporters also met in many places. A human chain for “solidarity” was formed in Mannheim.
A demo can be organized quickly via Telegram
The locations in Bavaria can all be found on Telegram’s “Networking Bavaria” list. In Hessen the list is called “Protest Hessen”, in Düsseldorf “Apo Düsseldorf”, to name just a few examples. It is demonstrated in many places on other days of the week and also in places where the city has issued a ban on unannounced “walks”, such as Munich. Fines are imposed there. Reference is also made to a website that pools the protest internationally.
In the previous weeks, according to the police, more people had appeared in numerous cities such as Düsseldorf and Hamburg than had been expected. The police registered a surge in the protests. While there were still 36 registered meetings in Brandenburg in the first week of December 2021, the number more than doubled to 95 at the end of the month. According to the police, most of the protest marches are not registered.
Resistance not only in the east
On the last Monday in the old year alone, a total of 19,000 people took to the streets at 75 gatherings in 62 Brandenburg towns. In Saxony-Anhalt – where there are no numerical restrictions on demonstrations – there were around 16,700 at 37 gatherings on the same day. Demonstrations were registered for this Monday evening in 26 locations in Saxony alone.
It is no different in the west. A week ago on Monday, around 3,000 people were counted in Saarland at a rally in Saarbrücken, 8,000 in several cities in Rhineland-Palatinate and around 1,000 in Fulda in Hesse. In Munich alone, thousands of opponents of the corona policy passed through last Wednesday the downtown. Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann from the CSU attested that some of them had “considerable fanaticism”. The fact that some of them harness their own children or even arm themselves in individual cases is “something that worries us”.