Around 160,000 people took part in a demonstration in Berlin today against the far-right and the beginning of a political rapprochement with the conservatives, local police said.
According to organizers, 200,000 people joined a rally in front of the German parliament.
The crowd then walked to the headquarters of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The protest took place three weeks before parliamentary elections in the country.
German conservatives and the far-right joined forces last week to pass a text in parliament that aimed to tighten the country’s migration policy.
The text, which is not binding, has great symbolic value. It was proposed by the conservatives, the favorites in polls ahead of the February 23 election, and received the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), without which the text could not have been adopted.
The text, among other things, demands that Germany turn back all foreigners without valid entry documents, including asylum seekers, at the border.
More than 220,000 people demonstrated yesterday in major cities such as Hamburg, Leipzig, Cologne and Stuttgart, ARD television reported.
“Since World War II, there has always been a clear consensus among all democrats in our parliaments – that we do not take joint actions with the extreme right,” said Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who accused his conservative opponent Friedrich Merz of putting an end to the consensus reached in 1949.
The debate was sparked by a recent knife attack, for which an undocumented Afghan with mental health problems was blamed. One child was killed. In December, a car attack was carried out in which the driver, originally from Saudi Arabia, deliberately drove into people at a Christmas market.
