The paradox of German success that the ultras want to exploit

There is a country in the world where there has been no confinement, there is no obligation to wear a mask on the street, the health services have not collapsed, the death toll has remained relatively low, the school operates normally and it has rained millions of public money to defray the ravages of covid-19.

It is also the country where tens of thousands of people demonstrate against the restrictions that the pandemic has placed on their lives.

Welcome to Germany.

Stephan Bergmann is one of the visible faces of

(lateral thinking), the Stuttgart-born movement that manages to bring tens of thousands of people to the streets.

Two months ago, at a demonstration, he was interviewed on web television and the video went viral.

Since then, this expert in stone and drum healing has harangued the masses from the stage and has served as a spokesperson for the organization.

He explains that Querdenken is an umbrella organization, operating with decentralized groups in the country and having millions of followers.

They are protesting "the massive restriction of fundamental rights such as demonstration.

To protest, we have had to go to court, "says Bergmann, alluding to the last minute authorization for the great march in Berlin.

It highlights the economic ruin that the pandemic has caused for artists or event organizers and opposes the obligation to wear a mask, which in Germany is applied indoors.

"It must be an individual decision."

Like him, some 38,000

- one million according to the organizers - took to the streets in Berlin a week ago and the calendar announces new calls.

It is a heterogeneous group in which anti-vaccine,

, libertarians, conspiranoids and far-rightists participate.

They deny that the virus is so bad, they reject vaccines and declare war on the mask.

They drink from alternative scientific sources and put their individual rights before any political and collective decision.

Along with a peaceful majority that proclaims peace, love and fundamental rights as a religion, the German extreme right parades in full, determined to seize the unique destabilizing opportunity that the pandemic offers them.

Neo-Nazi parties and groups were the protagonists of the threat to take over the Parliament building a week ago, achieving the alarming photo they were looking for and the condemnation of the entire German political class.

A day before, the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was aware of a very minority unease, but with an explosive potential.

"The virus is an imposition on our democracy."

The truth is that there is a certain confusion among the political and academic class around the mobilizations.

"A part may not be politicized, but they are a symptom of the uncertain times we live in and they seek answers in conspiracies", interprets Hans Vorländer, director of the Center for Constitutional and Democratic Research at the University of Dresden, who speaks of people "very empowered, who feel that the pandemic does not exist and who refuse to have their individual rights restricted".

Those who take to the streets are still a very noisy minority in a country where polls confirm that the vast majority (almost 90%) support the government's measures.

The average German treats them with disdain and they have hung the label of "

", against which they have rebelled in court.

The Berlin prosecutor's office has said, however, that yes, freedom of expression allows that name also in the mouth of Saskia Esken, the leader of the social democracy that used it.

Part of the explanation is that Germany is a victim of the paradox of success, or prevention as specialists call it.

Because for many Germans, the invisible virus is still a distant thing.

Very present in the media, but without a real presence in their lives.

“Do you know someone who has had it?” Is a question that protesters immediately blurt out.

In Spain, the answer would be obvious, but in Germany, much less.

A recent study by More in Common indicates that only 11% of Germans know someone infected, compared to 39% of British, for example.

Here, the combination of a good health system, good management and political pedagogy, and perhaps some luck, have achieved that the virus has been controlled to a certain extent and that the death toll -9,324 in a country of 83 million inhabitants - is comparatively low.

"In what other country would these people prefer to be?" Jens Spahn, the Health Minister, asked himself this week, booed at public events.

Success is also your sentence.

This week, in one of the smaller demonstrations in Berlin, Harald Wilfer, a retired professor who arrived from Darmstadt, in the west of the country, protested like the others, with open face.

He explained that he has been in the capital all week in protest in protest because "they restrict us the right of opinion and demonstration."

Making such a statement in public while manifesting does not in itself seem like a contradiction.

"The police could stop you," he says in reference to the new regional rule that requires wearing the mask in demonstrations of more than 100 people.

Dressed in a

hat

and a colorful scarf around his neck, Wilfer makes it clear: “I don't have a mask.

When I enter the subway, I cover myself with the handkerchief ”.

Simple answers

Jan Rathje, an expert on the extreme right at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, explains that those who demonstrate “read a lot about biology, but they do not understand how society works or the contradictions inherent to democracy.

They want immediate answers and embrace the information they receive as absolute truth.

They try to explain the pandemic in a very simple way.

They don't understand that to save people it is necessary to cut rights.

Rathje argues that the nexus between the extreme right and peaceful protesters is "the common enemy, the elites who want to impose their will."

Claudia Rosa, 52, also participates in the protests, who expresses another of the most heard fears.

“We fear that they will force us to vaccinate against the so-called coronavirus.

We do not know the side effect of a vaccine that has been manufactured very quickly.

This is a disease that is not fatal for everyone.

You cannot lock up the whole of society because a few have it.

This had never happened ”.

Rosa says that she will take to the streets every day, until the government “takes responsibility for what they have done to us.

There are people with depressions.

We make children sick with the mask ”.

Rosa says that they are “peaceful people”, that they want “love” and that she had never participated in demonstrations before.

She had always been on the left, although now she claims to be confused and would not know who to vote for.

Her new beliefs, she confesses, have cost her the break with family and friends.

"There are many people who still don't realize it," she says, convinced that she has seen the light.

"Trump is in Berlin"

Tamara K., a young naturopath from the west of the country, is now known throughout Germany.

Last weekend he incited protesters from the stage to seize the Reichstag building.

"Trump is in Berlin", he scoffed at himself spreading false news unscrupulously.

Right-wing expert Matthias Quent, director of the Jena Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, speaks of an expansion of far-right conspiracy theories circulating in the US, such as the followers of QAnon, and of a trumpification.

"We have seen in the Telegram messages that the objective was to take over the Reichstag building," Quent notes.

He indicates that Trump has become an example, "he is the messiah," says the researcher, who accuses the German extreme right, AfD, of promoting radicalization by paving the way by "spreading false news and denying the facts."

"The strategy is to politicize the frustration associated with the coronavirus," he says.

The experts also highlight the presence of anti-Semitism in the protests.

This is evident among those who relativize the Holocaust by wearing a star on the chest, emulating the yellow insignia used by the Nazis to stigmatize Jews, or among those who identify figures of the Jewish community as great enemies in their conspiracy theories.