2024–2025 German protests against right-wing extremism

chairpersons and Florian Gutsche Political analysts saw the AfD as benefiting both from dissent within the ruling traffic light coalition about how to carry out the transformation of the country into a competitive digitized economy, and from attempts by the opposition party CDU/CSU to regain voters from the AfD themselves through adopting in particular a tougher stance on migration. On 10 January 2024, investigative journalist group Correctiv published information revealing that members of the AfD had met Identitarian movement activists in the city of Potsdam, where plans to "remigrate" foreign-born Germans, including non-citizens as well as those with German citizenship, were proposed. The report gained massive traction in Germany, with critical comparisons being made to the 1940 Madagascar Plan to deport four million Jews; comparisons to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Final Solution was organized, were also circulating. The mentioning of the Wannsee Conference in the Correctiv report was criticized even though the report had not explicitly compared the two events. Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser said that the Correctiv revelations had evoked memories of the conference, but that she did not want to equate the two events. Many people and groups have called for the party to be banned, including historians and activist groups that date back to the aftermath of World War Two. Jens-Christian Wagner, head of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation in Thuringia said, "It cannot be that liberal democracy allows a party to participate in elections and finances its campaign that seeks to abolish liberal democracy". The VVN-BdA quoted Erich Kästner, "The events of 1933 to 1945 should have been fought by 1928 at the latest. Later, it was too late. We must not wait until the fight for freedom is called treason. We must not wait until the snowball has become an avalanche. We must crush the rolling snowball..." in a January 2024 call for a ban. Federal chairman of the VVN-BdA, Florian Gutsche, said "The revelation of the deportation plans has brought the AfD's inhumane ideology into the spotlight of public debate. However, these plans are not new. Its platform already clearly shows that it is a völkisch-nationalist party. Through party funding, the AfD has been providing state support to Nazis for years". The Values Union announced on 20 January that it would establish itself as a political party. ==Protests in 2024==

After several smaller-scale protests, in the evening of 12 January 2024 around 2,000 protested against the AfD at its Hamburg headquarters. The next day, a rally in Duisburg against an AfD new year's reception attracted around 2,400 protesters according to police, far more than anticipated by organizers at the time of registering the rally with authorities, which was before the Correctiv revelations. Also on 13 January, around 650 protesters in Düsseldorf demanded the investigation of the AfD to examine the possibility of its prohibition. On 14 January, thousands protested in Potsdam and at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Among those present at the protests in Potsdam on 14 January were chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock, both members of the Bundestag from the city. Interviewed by Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Baerbock said that the protesters were "for democracy and against old and new fascism," while Potsdam mayor Mike Schubert said that the remigration plans "are reminiscent of the darkest chapter of German history." Protests continued to draw larger crowds throughout the week, including a protest in Cologne, in which around 30,000 people participated. Non-AfD politicians from across Germany's political spectrum expressed support for the protests, with Scholz writing on Twitter that "We won't allow anyone to distinguish the 'we' in our country based on whether someone has an immigration history or not," pro-business Free Democratic Party politician Christian Dürr directly comparing the AfD to the Nazi Party, and CDU leader Friedrich Merz expressing that it was "very encouraging that thousands of people are demonstrating peacefully against right-wing extremism." The AfD was also condemned by several businesses, including Siemens, The size of the protests exceeded expectations by both police and the organizers; initial estimates of 50,000–80,000 people protesting in Hamburg on 19 January were increased in February 2024 by the city's interior authority to 180,000, after recalculation. Between 19 and 21 January, protests reached a size of 1.4 million people, according to organizers Campact and Fridays for Future. A planned march in Munich was cancelled for safety concerns, as 100,000 people, four times the registered amount, had arrived for the protest, according to local police. Members of the German government urged protests to continue, with Scholz urging as many people as possible to come out for democracy. voiced its intent to continue the rallies for the longer term. As part of the protests, various proposals to ban the AfD have been advocated, including from 25 members of the Bundestag from the SPD. Some of Habeck's comments, however, have been publicly interpreted as expressing support for a ban as protests escalated, saying that the AfD intended to replace German democracy with a system similar to Russia under Vladimir Putin. Others, such as constitutional scholar , have argued that a ban, while possible, would be ill-advised as a result of the AfD's popularity. The AfD would be only the third such party banned nationally, after the Socialist Reich Party and the Communist Party of Germany, both of which were banned during the 1950s, though its branches in the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia have been declared as extremist. Minister of Interior Faeser has expressed support for a ban on the party, but only as a last resort. Analysis of 2024 protests By the last week of January 2024, the protests had become the biggest in Germany since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. Soon after, according to some researchers, they had become the biggest in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. In early February 2024, sociologist Dieter Rucht said that the speed with which the protests had erupted had generally not been foreseen. The protests in early 2024 saw a much lower participation from the CDU/CSU Christian democrats than from parties further to the left in the political spectrum. Some observers assessed that it was unclear whether the first wave of protests had triggered changes beyond a somewhat greater awareness of politics and society of connections between the AfD and right-wing extremists. At the end of 2024, the AfD polled only slightly lower than before the protests. == Protests in 2025 ==

(VVN-BdA) protest banner at a protest against Alternative for Germany in Frankfurt in 2025. Translation: "Ban the AfD now! Ban Nazi parties, before it's too late". A wave of anti-AfD protests in January and February 2025 was compared by observers to the protests of 2024. The new wave of protests, which came shortly before the federal election held on 23 February, was partly in response to a non-binding resolution to restrict immigration which the CDU/CSU had pushed through parliament with the help of the AfD on 29 January 2025. The name Brandmauer-Demos, incorporating a previously used term for blocking the AfD from any influence on parliamentary decisions, was used by some media for the rallies of this wave. On the day before the election, Merz made defiant statements regarding the protests. Felix Anderl, a researcher at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, stated in an interview in early February that in addition to the wish of people for certain things not to change so close to elections, the strategy of CDU leader Friedrich Merz was adding urgency for the protesters. After the federal election, the CDU filed a catalogue of 551 parliamentary questions regarding 17 civil society groups, The filing met with sharp criticism from the addressed NGOs, and also prompted criticism from the social democrats, who were at the time preparing to enter talks with the CDU/CSU about a new grand coalition. In the wake of the decision by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in early May 2025 that the AfD was a "confirmed right-wing extremist" party, which was challenged in court by the party and resulted in a "standstill commitment" on the side of the BfV until a ruling, a protest in Berlin on 11 May 2025 calling for a ban of the party attracted 4,000 protesters according to police, and 7,500 according to the organizers. Rallies were also scheduled in over 60 other German cites. ==See also==