energy crisis
Anger winter coming? Researchers expect Saxony as a hotspot
Players such as the right-wing extremists Freie Sachsen are currently heating up the mood on the internet. Social researcher Piotr Kocyba fears that anger could also be vented on the streets in winter. photo
© Sebastian Kahnert/dpa
Refugees, Corona and now energy prices? Social researcher Piotr Kocyba warns that protests on the streets are threatening to flare up again this fall. Saxony could once again become a hotspot.
In view of the looming energy crisis and high inflation, social researcher Piotr Kocyba expects a new, violent wave of protests in the fall. “Saxony will be a hotspot here,” said the Chemnitz protest researcher of the German Press Agency.
Actors such as the right-wing extremists Freie Sachsen and the Identitarian Movement in social networks are already heating up the mood. The left also wants to call citizens to demonstrations against the planned gas levy on the street. In his summer press conference, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said he did not believe there would be unrest.
Kocyba: The establishment of terrorist groups is also conceivable
He also does not see any unrest in the sense of barricades in the cities and burning cars in Germany, explained Kocyba. However, he expects a further radicalization of protesters in the tone up to fantasies of violence and in dealing with security authorities. If the crisis lasts longer, it cannot be ruled out that terrorist groups will form, as was the case in Freital, for example, during the protests against refugees.
Recent events in Heidenau near Dresden give a foretaste of the coming protests and their radicalization, explained Kocyba, who works at Chemnitz University of Technology and is a member of the board of the Berlin Institute for Protest and Movement Research. There, the Free Saxons wanted to stage a staged trial against Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) at a rally. The ban on the assembly authority was later confirmed by the courts. Kocyba: “It was a very deliberate provocation and a crossing of boundaries typical of the extreme right.”
The Saxon Office for the Protection of the Constitution recently declared that the right-wing extremists had not yet had any resounding mobilization success with the topic of the energy crisis. However, extremist parties such as the Free Saxons tried to profit from citizens’ fears of social decline.
In many places in Saxony, thousands took to the streets every week last winter to demonstrate against the corona measures. According to Kocyba, the protests in the fall could reach a similar scale. That depends on how much the energy prices actually rise and whether possible restrictions on the gas supply affect consumers. Kocyba also sees Saxony as a focal point in the future because permanent protest milieus have established themselves here in recent years.