Tens of thousands gathered in Hamburg on Friday for a demonstration against the far right, and organizers said the protest was ended early because the mass of people led to safety concerns.
Tens of thousands gathered in Hamburg on Friday for a demonstration against the far right, and organizers said the protest was ended early because the mass of people led to safety concerns.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A prominent member of the Identitarian Movement, Austrian citizen Martin Sellner, presented his “remigration” vision for deportations.
In Hamburg, police said that some 50,000 gathered on a lakeside promenade Friday afternoon, while organizers put the figure at 80,000 and said many people weren’t able to squeeze into the venue, German news agency dpa reported.
Kazim Abaci of Unternehmer ohne Grenzen (Businesspeople without Borders), a group that was one of the organizers, said that “we have to end the demonstration early,” citing safety concerns and saying that the fire service was unable to get through the crowd.
“The message to AfD and its right-wing networks is: We are the majority and we are strong because we are united and we are determined not to let our country and our democracy be destroyed for a second time after 1945,” the year of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher told the crowd.
AfD has sought to distance itself from the extremist meeting, saying it had no organizational or financial links to the event, that it wasn’t responsible for what was discussed there and members who attended did so in a purely personal capacity.
National polls currently show AfD in second place behind the main center-right opposition bloc and ahead of the parties in the unpopular government.
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