More than 100k protest across Germany over far-right AfD's deportation plan | Hacker News Reader

More than 100k protest across Germany over far-right AfD's deportation plan

theguardian.com

16 pointsslow_typist22 comments

The title is misleading, people are on the street against the afd in general. They represent the global anti-democracy movement and got a number of votes in some regions that woke up people assuming that they aren't a real threat.

The "deportation" thing is part of it, but not that central IMO. They had an actual nazi conference with afd higher ups attending, discussing these topics. It was the catalyst that stirred action.

I find it funny when people say someone or some group is a threat to democracy and thus we have to take them off the ballot. But I guess it depends what you mean by Democracy, the will of the people or maintaining the Neo-liberal world order

You know, in Germany we have a few articles in our constitution to prevent history from happening again. You might have learned in school that we had some bad experiences not so long ago. There's no article that requires institutions to "maintain neo-liberal world order".

The Treaty of Versailles had quite a few articles designed to prevent WW1 from happening again. How did that work out?

> They had an actual nazi conference with afd higher ups attending, discussing these topics.

The article in question: https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...

Some more numbers (in German), sorted by states and cities:

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/demos-gegen-rechts-bilanz-1...

> More than 100,000 people turned out across Germany on Saturday in protest against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which sparked an outcry after it emerged that the party’s members discussed mass deportation plans at a meeting of extremists.

This article would benefit from linking to an article detailing what transpired at the meeting. As it stands, the article is about an outcry against something that has not be described in any detail.

Indeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/10/politicians-fr...

I'm not sure why they didn't link it considering it's their own reporting…

In my experience, newspapers (and other media) are really bad at using hyperlinks. They don't really use them other than a bot linking a few keywords here and there to their internal category pages.

How many German farmers were protesting last week? The "mainstream media" didn't say much about that.

Edit: In America; I saw it covered in Euro news.

German here, the farmer protests were very much in the news, however indeed with a more mixed sentiment and without numbers.

The protests seemed to be mostly focused on tractor rallies and blocking roads/intersections, as opposed to the pedestrian mass demonstrations we see currently. So I figure the number of farmers was probably much smaller, but more out of logistical reasons.

As a Canadian I have to warn you any method of transferring money will be eventually blocked, rules be damned

Not nearly as many. It looked big because it was tractors instead of people. And it was very well covered in all media. Don‘t try to spread false information here.

There are not that many farmers, though, and tractors are relatively slow. If you consider that, the impact of those protests was quite high.

> tractors are relatively slow

You're assuming "with a tractor" was the only way for farmers to show up to these protests. It was not; many of them showed up in plain cars.

> impact of those protests was quite high

Indeed, mostly because they were very disruptive. Despite prior assurances, they even hindered emergency services in performing their jobs.

I absolutely agree. I was also very disappointed by the many far-right statements and symbols I saw on signs. Sure, it might not have been the majority, but I can't understand how you're able to join these protests if you don't agree with the others' statements.

No fan of AFD at all, but why are people against deporting illegal immigrants?

A society is safe and prosperous as long as everyone plays ball by the same rules. You don't conform to the law in the country you're a guest in, then bye-bye.

You don't just let anyone off the street inside your house and then let them as they please, do you?

From the article, "Protests held at about 100 locations over party’s meeting with neo-Nazis to discuss deporting those it deems have failed to integrate, including German citizens".

They are protesting against the potential deportation of people with german citizenship who acquired it legally.

They can protest all they want, you can't legally deport a citizen. That's just a bunch of crazy talk.

If they have people who have gained citizenship but failed to integrate, then that proves the citizenship process is faulty and can be gamed, and needs a reform instead of handing passports out like candy, but once you decide to give someone citizenship you can't retroactively take it back and deport them.

The fault lies with who designed and approved the citizenship process(probably some clueless bureaucrats), not with who gained said citizenship, as they got it fair and square according to the law.

> They can protest all they want, you can't legally deport a citizen. That's just a bunch of crazy talk.

I agree currently they cannot legally deport anyone with citizenship. I think the fear is that, should they get a majority, they will change the law to make it legal. I can understand why some people are afraid.

Luckily international law still exists so you cannot just remove the nationality of someone unless he has another one. This would only apply to people with two or more citizenships. France already passed a law to remove french nationality of people convicted on charges of terrorism.

> If they have people who have gained citizenship but failed to integrate, then that proves the citizenship process is faulty

Agreed

> but once you decide to give someone citizenship you can't retroactively take it back and deport them.

My understanding was that they basically planned exactly that.

The questions around immigration, integration, asylum and German citizenship make up an eternal debate between centrist/progressive/left on the one and conservative/right groups on the other hand. It flares up every few years and in some form or other persisted since the 50s.

To my knowledge, the AFD position is not that different from the usual positions of hard right and Neonazi parties in that regard.

However what is new is exactly the plan to revoke citizenship of potentially large parts of the population according to completely arbitrary "integration" criteria. That plan evoked some very unfortunate memories of changes to citizenship laws in Nazi Germany and gave many Germans with some kind of immigration history the realisation that they might not be safe. This is what triggered this intense wave of demonstrations.

Please read what exactly has been discussed in the meeting which has been the reason for the current protests. The government has just passed new policies on deportations so for the AfD it‘s not just about deporting criminals.

As they‘re basically Nazis, just look up how everything was building up back in the 1930s-1940s. Then you‘ll know what the people are demonstrating against today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com