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Riot police have clashed with opponents of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on the streets of Erfurt in Germany, where thousands met to block roads and prevent AfD delegates from attending the party’s biennial national conference to elect its leadership.
Police reported 20,000 protesters were demonstrating in the eastern city, where Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla are expected to be re-elected as the party’s co-leaders in the run-up to crucial regional elections in which AfD could win power at state-level for the first time.
The protesters, led by the “Resistance” alliance, staged sit-in blockades in the city centre in an attempt to prevent the AfD’s approximately 600 delegates from reaching the conference grounds, with some abseiling from a motorway bridge and others glueing themselves to tram tracks to cause disruption.
Thousands of police were deployed to the city, and some were filmed using batons on protesters who ran towards them, while others were captured on camera struggling to hold back crowds of demonstrators.
However, a police spokesperson told Die Zeit that the demonstration had been “mostly peaceful”, adding that just under 100 offences had been recorded so far, many of them property damage by graffiti.
Despite the efforts of the protesters to cause disruption, a spokesperson for the AfD told reporters 540 delegates had managed to reach the conference centre before 5am and its congress had begun on time.
AfD’s decision to hold its conference on the centennial of a Nazi party conference in nearby Weimar, where Adolf Hitler unveiled the Hitler Youth movement and introduced the Hitler salute, has caused outrage in Germany.
Historians and politicians say the timing of the conference is a deliberate provocation, which AfD has denied, describing its critics as “clearly only interested in the compulsive weaponisation of history.”
Opponents of AfD accuse the party of promoting racist and anti-Muslim policies, and are angered by AfD politicians downplaying Nazi crimes.
Protesters in Erfurt included the federal environment minister, Carsten Schneider, and Thuringia’s interior minister, Georg Maier, who gathered at a second demonstration march organised by the Standing Together alliance, where the “Grandmas Against the Right” waved homemade signs.
“It’s important to send a signal against the shift to the right,” one of the demonstrators, Lene Krug, 19, from Gera, east of Erfurt, told reporters for Agence France-Presse. “The AfD is an anti-democratic party that spreads hate.”
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Another protester, who was among the group who stuck themselves to tram tracks in a city square, told AfP: “1933 to 1945 must never happen again,” referring to the period when the Nazis were in power.
Ella, 44, who gave only her first name, added: “The democratic parties need to understand that they must impose a ban [on the AfD].”
In his opening speech, Chrupalla accused demonstrators of protesting “against democratic decision-making”. He said: “They believe they have a monopoly on democracy. To these demonstrators I say: this democracy is just as much our democracy as it is yours.”
Holding party conferences is a “guaranteed right”, he added, according to Die Zeit. “These troublemakers are the last line of defence for our political competition.”
He then called on supporters to help his party win an absolute majority in the Saxony-Anhalt state elections. “That would send the right signal to the democracy-haters out there who wanted to prevent our party conference,” he said.
Describing his dual leadership with Weidel as “a successful duo the likes of which German politics has rarely seen”, he added: “We stand for unity, not division.”
