In several German cities, including Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Hanover and Düsseldorf, thousands of people protested Saturday against the severe restrictions resulting from the fight against the pandemic.
Thousands of protesters gathered in the Bavarian capital near the seat of the state government. According to the AFP agency, the police broke up a demonstration in Munich because its participants did not comply with the mandatory requirement to wear protective masks and respect social distancing.
In Düsseldorf , the capital of Germany’s most populous federal state, North Rhine-Westphalia, around 2,000 took to the streets to protest the pandemic imposed. Several demonstrations were also held in Berlin due to restrictions introduced in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic.
About 1,000 people gathered outside the Ministry of Health, according to police. A reporter from the DPA press agency spoke of several hundred people. Only 50 people officially declared their willingness to participate in the demonstration, the daily Deutsche Welle reported, citing a statement by the police.
In Berlin, most of the protesters wore face masks, but not all of them.
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In Dresden , Saxony, there were clashes between demonstrators and the police. According to the AFP, four officers were injured. Several hundred people protested in the city, mainly members and supporters of the Querdenken group, which includes pandemic deniers and opponents of vaccines. Politician Alexander Dierks, secretary general of the CDU of Saxony Alexander Dierks condemned the violence on Twitter and called Querdenker activists “violent extremists”
The Higher Administrative Court in Bautzen confirmed on Saturday evening that the demonstration by members of the Querdenker group in Dresden was illegal.
Other protests took place in Hamburg, Kiel, Stuttgart, Potsdam, Erfurt and Hanover . Protesters in Stuttgart attacked a team of TV journalists from the regional TV station SWR.
The protests in Germany took place during the period assessed by the healthy institutions as the peak in terms of the number of coronavirus infections.
Head of the 1st Institute of Roberta Kocha (RKI) Lothar Wieler said on Thursday that the third wave of the coronavirus epidemic had already begun in Germany. He added that despite vaccinations, the most restrictive preventive measures, such as wearing masks and maintaining social distance, should be kept.
Source: DW.com, AFP, dpa, PolskiObserwator.de