Germany’s G20 street chaos puts political heat on Merkel

HAMBURG: Raging street battles that marred Germany’s G20 summit have sparked a political fight over how Hamburg could descend into ‘mob rule’ and why Chancellor Angela Merkel chose a hotbed of leftist militancy as the venue.

Germany’s top-selling Bild daily was withering in its condemnation of the chaos that saw far-left and anarchist radicals torch rows of cars, loot shops and hurl rocks and bottles from burning barricades at riot police.

“One should use with caution the words ‘failure of the state’. Sadly, it applies in Hamburg,” the newspaper thundered yesterday, slamming the summit as a ‘debacle’.

“Of course the police did all it could. But the street belonged to the mob.The feeling of general security that the state must guarantee has ceased to exist in Hamburg over the last 48 hours.”

The harsh criticism came as 20,000 police in the city where Merkel was born braced for a third day of protests against the meeting where she hosted US President Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other world leaders.

Just behind the tightly-secured G20 summit venue, charred road barricades, trashed shops and stones, debris and shattered glass bore testimony to an anarchic night, when police commandoes with semi-automatic weapons detained militants who hurled rocks from rooftops.

“The terrible message of Hamburg is: When the mob wants to rule, it will,” said Bild.

One police union blamed Merkel and Hamburg mayor Olaf Scholz for allowing the chaos, which left over 200 police and as yet unknown numbers of protesters injured, and for choosing the city in the first place. — AFP