On January 11, in an interview broadcast on ARD public television, Thomas Haldenwang, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence service, expressed concern at the passivity of his fellow citizens in the face of rising anti-democratic forces.

"People retreat into the comfort of their private lives and don't realize the threats to our democracy today," he said. "I hope that society will wake up and that the silent majority will finally take a stand against extremism in our country."

In the 10 days that have passed, Germany indeed seems to have awoken. Haldenwang, however, has had little to do with it. When hundreds of thousands of Germans demonstrated against the far right on Friday, January 19 and Saturday, January 20 and Sunday, January 21, it was not in response to the secret service chief's injunction, but to a journalistic investigation published on January 10 on the website Correctiv.

In this investigation we learned that several leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party had discreetly met in a hotel in Potsdam, near Berlin, on November 25, 2023, to listen to an Austrian far-right ideologue, Martin Sellner, advocate the "remigration" of "millions" of immigrants and Germans of foreign origin to a "model state" in North Africa. And that none of them had ever opposed such a project. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Snowball effect

The article prompted a reaction from the country's highest authorities. A few hours after its publication, Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted on the social media network X (formerly Twitter) that "those who oppose our liberal and democratic basic order face justice." Five days later, alongside his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, he was one of some 10,000 people rallying against the far right in Potsdam – demonstrating alongside his fellow citizens for the first time since his election in 2021.

According to the civic organization Campact and the environmentalist collective Fridays for Future, which were among the organizers of the movement, more than 1.4 million people took part in the marches held across Germany on Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 350,000 in Berlin, 250,000 in Munich, 160,000 in Hamburg, 70,000 in Cologne and 50,000 in Bremen and Dresden.

In the eastern state of Saxony, where the AfD could come out on top in the regional election (the party claims 35% of voting intentions there, according to the latest polls), between several hundred and several thousand demonstrators pounded the pavements in smaller towns such as Görlitz, Chemnitz and Pirna, all unaccustomed to rallies of this size.

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