The Mob Marches On

The Populist contagion sweeping Europe spreads to Germany.

- Cathrin Schaer

Driving into the east German countryside can be a nerve-racking experience, and not just because the roads are narrower and the coffee worse. It’s because we know that, behind those twitching lace curtains in those respectable cottages, there are woodchopping, apple-picking, hay-baling neo-Nazis lurking.

How do we know? Because occasionally they emerge. This past month, they came out on the streets of the east German city of Chemnitz. After a 35-year-old local was stabbed to death there, and two suspects, an Iraqi and a Syrian, were arrested, a protest was organised.

Some of the demonstrators were ordinary citizens worried about law and order. But there was also a nasty conflation of football hooligans, neo-Nazis and mixed martial arts fighters – the last’s motto: “white brothers testing themselves against white brothers”. Those groups called adherents to come to the Chemnitz protest, eventually estimated at 6000 strong.