The recent no-vaccination demonstration in Berlin is not without consequences and emulations.
The most different acronyms of opponents of the anti-Covid government measures marched in August in Berlin under the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.
Saskia Esken, secretary of the SPD on Twitter calls them “Covidiots”. The political world underestimates them, and their declared intention to storm the Reichstag. The inevitable happens when in the late afternoon with a diversion a few hundred protesters escaped the police deployment and occupied the steps of the German parliament. Only a few clerks and two policemen succeed in blocking their break-in in the Reichstag‘s grand entrance hall. The occupation was symbolic but photos of the occupants with Second Reich flags, signs of anti-vaccination and anti-restrictions on personal freedoms for the anti-Covid fight have gone around the world.
The protesters are a composite set of conspiracy-theorists, right-wing extremists, proponents of lateral thought, identity movements, pacifists, anti-vaccination people, followers of the cult ” Qanon” loyal to US President Donald Trump, the only savior of humanity against a conspiracy for an infanticide on a planetary scale.
Many German politicians have easily condemned this demonstration and its representatives. An ill-concealed judgment of superiority and contempt has hidden from the eyes of many people that this demonstration was the confused, paradoxical and embarrassing rise of a part of German society. The window, which thanks to Welfare had preserved Europe and Germany since the end of World War II with a prolonged health peace, ended with the Covid-19.
Then, the German health system proved to be the first and most efficient system in Europe and it accompanied the dizzying rise of German power and influence, together with its French partners, in the European continent.
Angela Merkel has promptly acted, aware of the limitations with which the European Union had intervened during the 2008 crisis in Greece and then in the migrant crisis. In fact, Germany faces the Covid-19 crisis with extremely strong public finances. Fiscal stimulus corresponds to 8% of gross domestic product. In addition, there is the Recovery Fund linked to the EU budget for 700 billion euros. Facing the gigantic plan to re-organization of the society and the economy in order to make it more compatible and competitive to the new challenges, the political opposition remains speechless. Then, it is a perhaps insignificant, certainly unpleasant part of German society, someone says 15 thousand protesters, another 40 thousand, who tries what anyone should not dare to do, what anyone will condemn, what is not at all shareable except with the view of the closure of that long window of health peace that lasted since 1945. Whoever could manifestin one of Germany’s holiest sites, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and then self-destruct his/herself in a symbolic occupation and attempt to break into the Reichstag?
