Germans flock to concert to show their opposition to rallies by neo-nazis

Chemnitz hosts 50,000 people for music event in protest against far-right riots that led to violence

MORE than 50,000 people attended an open-air protest concert against the far-right yesterday in Chemnitz, the German city that has been the scene of neo-nazi rallies in recent days.

Huge crowds streamed into the small eastern city from across Germany to make a stand against the far-right protests in which foreigners were hunted through the streets and neonazis openly gave the Hitler salute.

Several of the country’s best known rock groups came together under the banner “We are more” – a direct reference to the far-right chant of “We are the people”.

The numbers dwarfed the 11,000 who took part in rival far-right and farleft protests at the weekend and brought the city to a standstill.

Mobile networks collapsed under the demand and there were concerns there would not be enough trains for people to get home.

Police refused permission for farright groups to stage rival protests on the grounds there was no space left in the city. “We are not naive. We are not under the illusion that we can just hold a concert and the world is saved,” said Felix Brummer, the lead singer of Kraftklub. “But sometimes it’s important to show people they’re not alone.”

Chemnitz has been gripped by days of violent protest since the fatal stabbing of Daniel Hillig, a local Germancuban man, by two suspects from Iraq and Syria.

Local people have staged their own protests, claiming the streets are unsafe at night. But they have also accused far-right groups of using the killing for their own political ends.

Hillig’s widow, Bianca, yesterday came forward to condemn the violence. “Daniel would never have wanted that! Never!” she told Bild newspaper. “I watched what happened in the city. It wasn’t about Daniel any more. Daniel was neither Left nor Right. What’s going on would never have occurred to him. We only want to mourn in peace.” The huge numbers attending yesterday’s concert arrived after Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, called for the country’s “silent majority” to “get up off the sofa and make a stand against the far-right”.

Meanwhile, German politicians are debating whether the nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AFD) should be treated as a threat to national security after it openly sided with far-right groups protesting in the city.

Prominent MPS from the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have led calls for the AFD to be put under surveillance by the intelligence services after it staged a joint march with the Pegida anti-muslim movement in Chemnitz.

Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, says Europeans have a habit of talking about the hideous reaction to a problem rather than the problem itself. Why? Because it’s easier. It’s easier, for instance, to discuss how awful Tommy Robinson – the antiislamist campaigner – is than the child-grooming gangs that sparked the backlash that made Robinson famous. Yes, Robinson is very easy to talk about. We’ve seen home-grown thugs like him come and go for decades, and we know why they’re wrong and what words to use about them. The problem with migrant criminals, however, is harder to articulate. How do we address that without sounding like … well, Tommy Robinson?

Consider Chemnitz, a city in Saxony, eastern Germany. In the early hours of Sunday Aug 26, a Cuban-german carpenter was fatally stabbed. Word leaked that two migrants were responsible: a Syrian and an Iraqi. By Monday, the streets were full of Right-wing protesters. Law and order seemed to break down; some of the protesters attacked individuals who didn’t look German. There were Nazi salutes, which in Germany are technically illegal.

So, our attention was drawn from a crime to the criminal reaction, from a killing to “the spectre haunting Europe”. Nationalism is certainly a trauma that needs confronting.

Germany has a neo-nazi, violent fringe that, thanks to the internet, has achieved a new level of co-ordination. And, yes, it’s tempting to draw a line from that to the Right-wing party Alternative for Germany (polling second in Saxony at the moment), while the anti-islamist Pegida group was formed not far from Chemnitz (a branch of Pegida was opened in England in 2016 by one Tommy Robinson). Elsewhere, Lega is surging in Italy; the Sweden Democrats are on the up. If nationalists do well enough in next year’s EU elections, they could form a powerful coalition in the European parliament.

We could draw a picture of a black web spreading slowly across the continent, but we should resist superficiality. In a new book, Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin argue that these movements vary in character but that most of them are not Thirties-style fascists: they are national populists. The distinction must seem irrelevant if you’re the target of their anger, but Eatwell and Goodwin’s point is still important, which is that old voting patterns based on class and Cold War ideologies are giving way to debates about identity motored by the arrival on the continent of vast numbers of developing world migrants.

The standard, liberal way to deal with this phenomenon is to stress the West’s moral responsibility to help those in need; advance a narrative of inclusion and diversity; and push back against nationalists by labelling them racist. The implication of Chemnitz and European opinion polls is that this has ceased to work. It’s probably now doing more harm than good.

Delegitimizing debate about immigration smacks, as Murray warns, of focusing disproportionately on the outcome of a social tension rather than the source of the tension itself. We had a stark reminder of that at this newspaper when Boris Johnson published a column about the burka. Liberals accused him of a hate crime because he joked that burka-wearers look like letter boxes, and thus missed the wood for the trees. Boris is not a raving nationalist. On the contrary, he is a classical liberal who wants an amnesty for illegal immigrants, and his stance on the burka is the very definition of tolerance: I don’t like it but I wouldn’t ban it. This is a commonplace view among Tory elites, and while the rest of Europe is steadily outlawing the burka, my suspicion is that this is the one country that never will, because any dislike of religious conservatism is balanced by a small- state ethic of not telling people what to wear. What is more likely to radicalise British opinion isn’t the burka: it’s Westminster and the media trying to compel voters to pretend they love the burka. Indeed, a critical component of the new national populist narrative is that the establishment is providing a special protection for immigrants.

Politicians must heed that concern, even if it’s mistaken. It’s striking, the role that amateur news sources and rumour played in the Chemnitz demos – frightening, in fact – but if you want to counteract such noise, you must listen to what’s being said. Reports show Right-wing protesters believe migrants are tolerated by the police when they sexually harass women; refugees are being given freebies; the media lie constantly. Some of the protesters, far from seeing themselves as heirs to Hitler, identify with the anti-nazi White Rose movement.

I suspect they believe it is the state that is dangerously authoritarian, not they – more interested in forcing through its ideological project of multiculturalism than, say, enforcing the law. If such views gain currency, that will be the real tipping point in European politics, the moment at which voters reject the conventional outlook of elites like Boris and turn to strong outsiders to fix things.