Left-wing protesters in Germany called for supporters of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to be killed during a rally against political extremism.
Amid nationwide protests over the weekend, in which organisers claimed over a million people rallied against the right-wing AfD party, it was ironically the left which seemingly exposed itself as harbouring extremists.
A report from the left-liberal Aachener Zeitung newspaper on Sunday hailed the local demonstration in the North Rhine-Westphalian city of Aachen against the AfD, which it claimed saw around 10,000 people attend.
The celebratory article, headlined: “Aachen mobilises against right-wing hate” featured a lead image of the report showed protesters holding a banner reading “Afdler Toten”, which has been translated to “Kill AfD supporters”. The image also showed masked protesters dressed in the familiar black bloc uniform waving the flag of the radical leftist Antifa group.
The article was quietly amended, however, after observers noted the potentially criminal calls to violence by the left-wing protesters, with the image being changed to a less extreme picture, which also did not feature any Antifa-style radicals.
Nevertheless, questions remain, particularly given that the original image showed police officers nearby the banner calling for the killing of AfD supporters, yet no arrests were made during the protest.
Gunnar Lindemann, who serves as a member of the Berlin House of Representatives for the AfD, said on social media that he has filed a criminal complaint with the Cologne Police over the banner.
A police spokesman told the Junge Freiheit newspaper that the image would be sent to the “prosecutor’s office for decision.” The spokesman said it was “currently unclear” why no action was taken during the protest.
The incident came amid demands to ban the AfD and a weekend of protests from leftists throughout Germany following the report sponsored by the government and leftist activist organisations such as the Soros Open Society Foundations, which claimed that several low-level members of the AfD attended a conference in November in which calls were allegedly made to deport German citizens with migration backgrounds.
The report has been disputed by multiple people who attended the meeting, including members of the centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Despite the denials, the government of Olaf Scholz and the legacy media has seized on the apparently manufactured scandal as a welcome distraction from the faltering German economy and a farmer uprising against the neo-liberal globalist agenda from Berlin and the EU.
Scholz openly backed the protests, declaring in a video on Friday that the German people must “take a stand” as “right-wing extremists are attacking our democracy”. Scholz has so far not commented on left-wing extremists calling for AfD supporters to be killed.