Protests against high energy prices and the federal government’s crisis policy have not been as violent as some feared. At the beginning of the new year, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution expects immigration to become more important again as a mobilization issue in the right-wing spectrum. “I didn’t see the bad scenarios of a ‘hot autumn’ or ‘angry winter’, as sketched by many, coming,” said the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, of the German Press Agency. In fact, “the current protests are more of a gentle breeze.” He added: “It blows mainly in Saxony and Thuringia”; but the number of participants is also declining in these two federal states.
It should also be noted that the bourgeois milieu, which was still strongly represented in the Corona protests, is withdrawing more and more. “There is currently a mixture of right-wing extremists, such as representatives of the New Right, conspiracy theorists, ‘Reich citizens’ and ‘self-administrators’, delegitimizers, but also parts of the state association of the AfD in Thuringia, which is classified as proven extremist, or right-wing extremist parties such as the Free Saxony.” There is hardly any demarcation between the individual groups. What binds all these groups together is “the goal of overcoming this political system,” said Haldenwang. The topics used for mobilization are obviously “exchanged according to taste”, depending on what is working at the moment.
Thomas Haldenwang, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
(Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa)
In September and the first half of October, several thousand participants gathered for demonstrations, some of which also protested sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine. From the point of view of the President for the Protection of the Constitution, the climate protests have so far given no reason for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to observe them.