In Soviet Germany, the government protests YOU

“We are the cordon sanitaire – no cooperation with the AfD”: the banner leading the Berlin protest against AfD and CDU on 2 February, which was financed in part by the German taxpayer and arranged by semi-affiliated apron organisations of the governing Green and Social Democrat parties of Germany.

All the activists are out in force.

Every day there are new protests “against the right,” and by “the right” they do not merely mean Alternative für Deutschland and the one-in-five Germans who vote for them, as was the case last year at this time. Since Friedrich Merz stepped over the cordon sanitaire at the beginning of this month, “the right” now also includes the centre-right CDU and CSU parties. Over half of all Germans now find themselves on “the right” and urgently require democratic reeducation. What is worse, it is not just crazy pink-haired activists and septum-pierced Antifa who want to do the reeducating, oh no. It is the government itself; the activists are merely their agents.

According to taz, 500,000 right-thinking Germans took to the streets this past weekend to combat the out-of-bounds radical views held by 52% of everybody. Perhaps 200,000 or 250,000 or 320,000 turned out for the massive “Democracy Needs You” protest in Munich on Saturday. A further 35,000 people “warned against a shift to the right” in Bremen, the absurd “Grannies against the Right” brought 24,000 people to the streets of Hannover, and another 14,000 denounced “right-wing extremism” in Marburg. There were also protests throughout Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Wuppertal, Aachen, Duisburg, Gütersloh, Gummersbach and Euskirchen. Yesterday 15,000 showed up to protest an AfD event in Freiburg; they were less than peaceful. And that is just what I found by scanning a few headlines. I could easily expand this paragraph into an entire post because they are protesting everywhere and all the time “against the right” these days.

I must emphasise again the extremely expansive notion of “the right” that is in play at these protests. Basically everyone who is not on the left – and particularly everyone who does not vote for the Greens or the Social Democrats (SPD) – presently attracts the activists’ ire. That is very interesting, because we are in the final stages of an election campaign and the Greens and the SPD are the only parties in government. Could it be that the Greens and the SPD are using the substantial resources of the German state to call forth massive street protests against all the Germans who are not planning to vote for them?

Yes, in fact that is exactly how it could be:

When 160,000 demonstrators turned out to protest on behalf of the cordon sanitaire on the first weekend in February, and organisers projected the words “All Berlin hates the CDU” onto the Victory Column, the red-green federal government provided financial support. The rally was co-sponsored from the coffers of the federal budget … indirectly and in two ways. As in many German cities, the organiser was the association Campact. Campact itself does not receive government funds. Yet they are the primary stakeholder of the nonprofit HateAid, which receives funds from the Ministry for Family Affairs. Since 2020, HateAid has received a total of almost 2.5 million Euros from the “Live Democracy” project, and their funding has just been extended. According to the Ministry for Family Affairs, HateAid can expect 424,823 Euros this year for its work against online hate speech.

Thousands also took to the streets in Dresden and Leipzig to protest CDU plans for migration policy. In both cities, the SPD and the Greens indirectly sponsored the rallies with taxpayer money, this time through the Workers’ Welfare Association (AWO). This association enjoys the favour of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Family Affairs. The AWO received tens of thousands of Euros … in 2024. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AWO state association received 90,043 Euros from the Ministry of Family Affairs in 2025, among other things from the ‘Live Democracy’ project …

Paus’s ministry also provides financial support to many of the organisers of demonstrations in Schleswig-Holstein. This year, a total of 1.525 million Euros will flow ... The municipalities divide the money equally among themselves, with each receiving 140,000 Euros to form local “partnerships for democracy.” Many of the sponsored organisations have sponsored demonstrations on behalf of the cordon sanitaire. In Kiel, the Green-financed “Central Education and Advice Centre for Migrants” … called for a protest in front of the CDU headquarters, in Lübeck the “Lübeck Refugee Forum” did the same …

All of this is to varying degrees illegal. Non-profit organisations, which receive tax-deductible contributions from supporters, are bound to political neutrality. Nor can the government finance (directly or otherwise) campaign events against the political opposition. Since 2021, however, in the name of defending democracy, the traffic light coalition have called into being an absolute jungle of NGOs to intimidate voters, censor the internet and riot on the streets against parliamentary votes. Their semi-affiliated activist cadres police German politics and redefine as right-wing and forbidden whatever it is our rulers happen to disagree with at the moment.

Andreas Rosenfelder (at Welt) proposes that it is the “division between state and society” that differentiates “liberal democracy” from “authoritarian and totalitarian systems.” This would mean that liberal democracy is at the very least “threatened” in Germany, if indeed it has not been quietly abolished. Perhaps that happened while we were all cowering under our beds worrying about sub-microscopic respiratory pathogens.

A much more tangible, but less noticed danger [than the AfD] comes from those organisations that claim to represent civil society and save democracy – although they are in fact mere continuations of the state apparatus …

This was revealed recently by the scandalous network of funding that links the current federal government with those groups that are apparently organising the spontaneous protests against the CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz and his alleged “shift to the right.”

From ‘Grandmothers against the Right’ to the Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, from HateAid to Campact, from BUND to NABU, we are learning about a structure of associations and organisations that … receive direct or indirect funding from the Green-controlled Ministry of Family Affairs under Lisa Paus, from Nancy Faeser's SPD-affiliated Ministry of the Interior and even from Olaf Scholz’s Chancellery – and that are now intervening in the election campaign to support the governing parties. … This practice violates the constitution: A democratic state must not misuse taxpayer money to actively intervene in the formation of public opinion or to fight opposition parties.

In fact, the government-friendly puppet masters of the anti-CDU protests are just the tip of the political iceberg. For the NGOs have long since become a state within a state, a shadow or ‘deep state’ if there ever was one … As militant blockers of discourse and defenders of the status quo, they prevent urgently needed reforms – whether in migration policy, social policy or energy policy. In doing so, the NGOs use all means of manipulation and covert influence – and, like the supposedly “non-profit” media agency Correctiv or the dubious “hotlines for internet hate,” they are always on hand to discredit dissenting opinions as “disinformation” by “fact-checking.”

These very unorthodox if still somewhat naive conclusions were published today in a major CDU-friendly newspaper. There are advantages but also costs to the left in directing their machine against the centre-right and accusing the fine, upstanding and self-consciously “democratic” politicians of the Union parties also of right-wing extremism. It means that these men are beginning to notice some of the same very creepy things we have been writing about for years, and they have very powerful platforms to explain what is wrong with all of this.

The left, so long a hegemonic force in Germany, finds itself in control of much of the bureaucracy and commanding a vast NGO network, but with dwindling popular support and no longer any firm backing from the American empire. They enjoy opposition and to some degree it has even radicalised them, but note how much it has also confined their focus. We have had no high-profile climate demonstrations for over a year; Letzte Generation have stopped blocking streets and painting things orange, while Fridays for Future are no longer organising lunch-hour marches against carbon dioxide. They are all too busy protesting fascism instead. There are still the pro forma liturgical marches on Christopher Street Day to celebrate eccentric sexual and gender minorities, but those too no longer attract leftist energy as they once did. The new problem against which the entire left will now direct its efforts is “the right,” and they plan to combat that problem by doing a lot of the very things that caused “the right” (really, just populist politics) to surge in the first place. They will keep the borders open, they will continue their censorious and authoritarian meddling in the opinions and expressions of ordinary people, and in the process they will forfeit ever more public acceptance.

All of this only goes one way now. Pressure will build and build on the CDU to violate the cordon sanitaire again. Either they will resist and make AfD the most powerful party in Germany – destroying themselves and their own electoral prospects in the process – or they will relent. All of the absurdities of the past twenty years will begin to crumble as parliamentary majorities can no longer be found to support them. And all this will happen despite the screeching recalcitrant media, despite the endless street protests “against the right,” despite the legal intimidation, despite the internet censorship – despite everything.