Police brace for more far-right protests in Germany
German police braced for more far-right protests against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies in the eastern city of Chemnitz, where a fatal stabbing sparked outbreaks of racist mob violence.
Saxony state police said they would be backed by reinforcements from five other states, after being heavily outnumbered by thousands of extremists in unrest on Sunday and Monday.
The flashpoint city — where state premier Michael Kretschmer was to hold a town hallstyle meeting on democracy while demonstrations were expected outside — has seen a violent outbreak of anger against what protesters label “criminal immigrants” since Sunday’s knife killing.
Police arrested an Iraqi and a Syrian for the stabbing of a 35year-old carpenter for a crime that set off street attacks against people whom the mob took to be foreigners.
The disturbing scenes, which saw assaults against an Afghan, a Syrian and a Bulgarian man and were described as “pogrom-like” by some observers, have sparked widespread revulsion in Germany and beyond.
In another violent hate crime overnight in the former communist east, a 20-year-old migrant was subjected to xenophobic insults and kicked and beaten by three men in the city of Wismar, police said.
Images of protesters making the Hitler salute were “shocking”, said UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
Merkel condemned the farright protests, declaring there is no place for “hate in the streets” in a liberal democratic state.
Tension risked being inflamed further by a news report that the Iraqi suspect in the murder case had, despite a lengthy criminal record, somehow avoided deportation. The hairdresser arrived in Germany in 2015, the peak year of the influx that would bring over 1million people to Germany, reported mass-circulation Bild daily. He had reportedly received a suspended sevenmonth jail term for assault and been charged with other offences, including taking illegal drugs across national borders, fraud and property damage.
Crimes by immigrants are routinely seized on by the farright Alternative for Germany and the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, who label Merkel a “traitor” for allowing them into the country.