Youth protests: CDU and SPD warn of infiltration, Greens and Left push back
Ahead of youth protests announced for 31 October, German parties are at odds over how to respond. The Greens and the Left Party accuse Interior Minister Dobrindt of criminalising young people.
Symbolic image · Photo: Daniel Schwen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
After a weekend of partly violent protests in several European countries, interior policy experts from the conservative bloc and the SPD are warning of unrest in Germany too. Alexander Throm (CDU), interior policy spokesman for the conservative parliamentary group, told the Rheinische Post that the danger of infiltration by "left-wing extremist forces, parts of the migrant milieu and criminals" had to be taken seriously. Calls on social media were "worrying", even if they were a minority, and violence was "not to be tolerated", he said.
His SPD counterpart Sebastian Fiedler stressed that there was "never and nowhere any legitimacy" for "violent protests". The security authorities were preparing "early and extraordinarily professionally", he said, which included examining who was stoking the situation online.
Greens parliamentary leader Britta Haßelmann defended young people's right to protest peacefully for their future and called for lowering the voting age to 16 in federal elections. "Attempts to instrumentalise their concerns for political purposes are unacceptable, and we firmly reject them." Left Party interior policy spokeswoman Clara Bünger accused Dobrindt of casting general suspicion: "When young people protest against social injustice, they are suddenly declared a security risk."